Re:Google joins .NET Foundation as Samsung brings .NET suppo...
by millstone on Wednesday November 16, 2016 @06:41PM
(#12972720)
I don't like UI frameworks that work the way you describe either! I think this is mainly C++-legacy living on in Java and .NET, where they pay a penalty for being static. OO UI frameworks in dynamic languages can be structured very differently.
In Cocoa, you don't have these silly class-specific interfaces ("ButtonClickListener" or whatever). Instead it uses target/action: you give the button an object, and the method name to call on the object. So it does allow you to bind any member of that "world of classes" as-is.
Next, you allow the target to be dynamically determined. For example, say you have a button representing the Copy to Clipboard. You can set its target object to a sentinel representing the keyboard focus. And the button can even use reflection, and disable itself if the focus doesn't support Copy.
In a functional world, functions are opaque: the only thing you can ultimately do with a function is call it. But in an OO world, functions are closer to objects: they have names, they can be inspected, they can be dynamically dispatched. This is part of what makes OO languages excel at UIs.
In Cocoa, you don't have these silly class-specific interfaces ("ButtonClickListener" or whatever). Instead it uses target/action: you give the button an object, and the method name to call on the object. So it does allow you to bind any member of that "world of classes" as-is.
Next, you allow the target to be dynamically determined. For example, say you have a button representing the Copy to Clipboard. You can set its target object to a sentinel representing the keyboard focus. And the button can even use reflection, and disable itself if the focus doesn't support Copy.
In a functional world, functions are opaque: the only thing you can ultimately do with a function is call it. But in an OO world, functions are closer to objects: they have names, they can be inspected, they can be dynamically dispatched. This is part of what makes OO languages excel at UIs.