[Openmcl-devel] prompt-for-file (embarrassing question)

[Bo Yao]

It's my pleasure to have a chance to see many excellent experienced Lispers
give their ideas on CL's GUI today and in old days. I am a new Lisper
learning common lisp for just two years, don't have a chance to see what
MCL is like, but read all your discussions in detail, it seems so magical,
now I want to buy an old Mac to have a look.
I admitted these webkit based GUI or cross-platform ones can never be as
good as native ones and it becomes harder to keep track on new platform
specific API. But, seem we also don't have enough time and determination to
make these platform specific APIs. (Seems it's another a "worse is better"
problem) So maybe it's more possible to implement only a Lisp's GUI
abstraction based on Webkit based, GL based drawing, as Jānis Džeriņš said.
And don't try to make the same look-and-feel of current OS, just provide a
descent cross-platform look-and-feel, like java swing or a python library
called kivy: https://kivy.org. This will enable us to create intellij or
atom like GUI, but add support for presentation and inspect anything. Of
course, If we can separate the look-and-feel definition apart, not so
integrated with actual drawing code, as McCLIM currently does, maybe we can
reuse the format GTK+ or Qt used and provide a better than nothing
cross-platform look-and-feel.
You may be not satisfied with this non-native approach, but nowadays new
programmers tend to learn cross-platform frameworks and avoid native ones,
as there are much more important we need to learn. Before I comes to Lisp I
used gtk+, Qt, wxWidgets. I don't use a native but platform specific
one(e.g. CCL's cocoa bridge), not because it's not great, but I am not
versatile enough and also lack time to port it to other OS. The same
situation is in current day's mobile development, startups tend to use
PhoneGap, React Native, etc.
I'm not as talented as all of you, but my opinion may, reflect what young
programmers in my age think about this problem (I'm 22)
-- 
Sincerely,
Bo
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