[Cialug] GUI Programming

[Todd Pierce]

I've generally avoided doing GUI programming (professionally) as much as
possible throughout my career.

For one, it requires more psychology than programming since you have to
predict all the possible ways in which a human can be stupid.

Second, everybody in the company becomes your boss.  They want to change
(each in a different way) how everything looks and feels, even if it
sabotages all the functionality of the form!

Third, although this has changed a lot in the past few years (as people
become less responsible), 99% of what is interesting happens on the back
end.  The front end is supposed to be a dumb interface to what is actually
doing the data processing (the interesting stuff to program).  Like I said,
though, businesses lately are collapsing the processing and the interface
into one entity, which is really clumsy and stupid, if you ask me.

-T

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 12:44 PM, David Champion <dchamp1337 at gmail.com>wrote:

> It also requires an appreciation for pizza ordering and card games.
>
> I agree with Scott, it is a different model than what most people are used
> to with transaction processing.
>
> I used to do a lot of desktop application programming I worked on an
> application called FIREHOUSE Software (data collection for fire
> departments), which has some of the most complex data entry screens I've
> ever seen. When we would send tech support questions into Microsoft they
> were amazed with how much stuff we had going on.
>
> You can do a lot of similar kinds of event-driven things in web forms with
> javascript and AJAX and the like.
>
> -dc
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Scott Yates <Scott at yatesframe.com> wrote:
>
> > I am not sure if this is the problem, but one of the big things to
> realize
> > about most modern GUI programming is that it is "event driven".
> >
> > This is probably not where your confusion lies, but just in case I
> thought
> > I would mention it.
> >
> > If you need more to read:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I hate it when programming books use card games or pizza ordering
> > > programs to aid learning of the language.  It fails to interest me.
> > > O'Reilly has some sort of magical voodoo stuff they use to get around
> > > having to use games and pizza, and yet still teach you a language.
> > > Other publishers could learn something from them, I think.
> > >
> > > I'm not a professional programmer, but it does take up a good chunk of
> > > my workday.  I'm taking a second level programming class right now at
> > > Simpson, based on Java.  Last time I took a Java class it was taught
> > > by an evil villain (the guy wore all white suits and a pink bowtie)
> > > and I was scarred.  This time it's going better, though.  The
> > > instructor is very cool and we're not creating pizza programs.  But I
> > > have trouble understanding GUI programming.  I feel like there's some
> > > basic lesson where they explained the reasoning, the concepts, the
> > > things you're supposed to keep in mind, that I missed.  I'm great with
> > > logic, and I grok the whole object oriented thing.  Not a prob.
> > > Polymorphism.  Inheritance.  Cool stuff.  But I don't get GUI
> > > programming.
> > >
> > > Question: If you are a programmer, how often do you program GUIs?
> > > Visual stuff other than markup?
> > >
> > > --
> > > Todd
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