Is there like a good resource on GUI programming, by which I mean not "how to use the latest framework which is running in electron btw" but actual fundamentals on the theory behind graphical user interfaces and flows and how it all works?

@badrihippo I'm not a programmer so pardon me if I'm misinterpreting what you're asking for. As far as fundamentals of GUI, I think Apple's old Human Interface Guidelines (which they've badly strayed from for decades) is a great guide to how GUIs should work.

As they probably weren't paying enough attention to it at the time, you'd want to synthesize this with more recent works on accessibility to disabled people. Highest common denominator of accessibility.

https://archive.org/details/macintoshhumanin0000unse/mode/2up

@meganL thanks...I was actually thinking more about the programming part (how to implement a GUI)

But this does indeed sound like a good background and something I should read more about in addition to the technical side of things! I've never thought about how current GUI designs came about "from first principles" as it were 👀

@badrihippo modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Van.js are all very similar, but I have not seen a consistent name for this family of frameworks. I have heard it called “The Elm Architecture,” because they are loosely based on how the Elm programming language originally did GUI programming in the browser. I have also heard it called the Model-View-Update paradigm. But most people just call it “React-like” or “Reactive Programming” because they are all similar to the very popular “React.js” framework.

Note that this should not be confused with Functional Reactive Programming (FRP), although the two are not completely different. As I understand it, React-like GUIs and FRP can both be implemented on top of a more powerful and more general computation model called “propagators” (here is the PDF of the original Propagators paper).

@dthompson wrote a really good blog post about FRP, propagators, and React-like frameworks.

I hope that helps, but I am not as well-versed in the theory of this stuff as I should be.

Oh, and I should say, before React-like took over the world wide web, GUI programming was mostly intertwined with Object Oriented Programming and design, so a good place to start might be to read up on Smalltalk OOP and GUI design.

#tech #software #GUI #ReactiveProgramming #FRP #Scheme #Haskell #SchemeLang #Propagators #ElmArchitecture #ReactJS #Smalltalk #OOP #ObjectOriented

@ramin_hal9001 maybe the "React" misdirected people; I was actually thinking of how to go about writing *desktop* GUI apps (using #GTK for example). Or do native GUIs also do things similar to React and its ilk these days?

I have played around with FRP using Elm and it was quite a fun experience! But I see from @dthompson's post that they're no longer following FRP?

@disaster2life sure, will do!