Re:Is there any code in Firefox (as of 2020) that comes from...
by DonHopkins on Saturday March 28, 2020 @01:42AM
(#22709478)
The genius of TCL/Tk, and the reason I believe Tk was so incredibly successful despite the flaws and shortcomings of TCL, is that toolkits like Motif, based on the X Toolkit Intrinsics, that aren't written AROUND an existing extension language, end up getting fucked by Greenspun's Tenth Rule:
>"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule
The X Toolkit ends up needing to do all of these dynamic-scripting-language-like things, like resolving names and paths, binding events to handlers, calculating expressions, and instantiating objects based on resource data. So if it doesn't already start out with a standardized scripting language to use for that, it has to duplicate all that dynamic almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-half-of-Common-Lisp stuff itself.
Case in point: Motif's infamous UIL (because X resource files weren't half-assed enough).
And then when you do get around to plugging that toolkit into some other scripting language (the way WINTERP plugged Motif/Xt into XLisp, or GTK/GObject plugs into Python for that matter), now you have two or more fat bloated complex buggy poorly documented incompatible impedance-mismatched half-assed competing layers of middleware and object models tripping over each other's feet and spraying each other with seltzer bottles like the Three Stooges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
>"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule
The X Toolkit ends up needing to do all of these dynamic-scripting-language-like things, like resolving names and paths, binding events to handlers, calculating expressions, and instantiating objects based on resource data. So if it doesn't already start out with a standardized scripting language to use for that, it has to duplicate all that dynamic almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-half-of-Common-Lisp stuff itself.
Case in point: Motif's infamous UIL (because X resource files weren't half-assed enough).
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil...
And then when you do get around to plugging that toolkit into some other scripting language (the way WINTERP plugged Motif/Xt into XLisp, or GTK/GObject plugs into Python for that matter), now you have two or more fat bloated complex buggy poorly documented incompatible impedance-mismatched half-assed competing layers of middleware and object models tripping over each other's feet and spraying each other with seltzer bottles like the Three Stooges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342
>Speaking of the plague, does it support UIL? ;)
>Neils Mayer described WINTERP (XLisp + Motif) as: You might think of such functionality as "client-side NeWS without the postscript imaging model".
http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/
>Don Hopkins wrote to a comp.human-factors discussion about "Info on UIL (User Interface Language)" on January 22, 1993:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HM...
>Here are some classic messages about UIL. Avoid it like the plague.
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