From: Joshua Ballanco <jballanc@...>
Date: 2008-11-08T00:33:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby has a Face that it wears on its feet

Lloyd Linklater wrote:
> Kyle Hunter wrote:
>   
>> Jayson Williams wrote:
>>     
>>> How about a melding of the two?
>>>       
>> Giving shoes an official place in the Ruby language hierarchy would open 
>> up a new world for desktop application programming for Ruby.
>>     
>
> That would not be appropriate.  Ruby is a language.  Making a specific 
> gui library part of the language would be mixing things that should not 
> be mixed *on that level*.
>
> That said, I *would* like a development environment that includes 
> standardized gui libraries, and shoes seems fine.
>   
This is sort of reminiscent of a discussion I had with some of the 
MacRuby team a while back. (BTW, if you like Shoes, also check out 
HotCocoa!) Essentially, what it comes down to is that a complete GUI 
toolkit is probably not appropriate for a language, and only marginally 
appropriate for a standard library. One problem with Shoes is the list 
of dependencies would significantly increase the size of a default Ruby 
installation (were it to be included standard).

Probably what would be worth looking into is something like a standard 
DSL for GUI programming. This could be an abstraction above the GUI 
libraries (which could then be pluggable). So, for example, you could 
have a Ruby app which used a Swing plug in for JRuby, a HotCocoa plug in 
for MacRuby, Tk or wxWidgets or whatnot for Linux, and some sort of .Net 
back end for IronRuby.

The difficulty is that each GUI environment has its own unique concepts 
and paradigms. If we were to restrict ourselves to only that which is 
common between all, we'd end up with AWT...

-Josh