There are very few languages well suited to creating UIs. Smalltalk may be the only one.
Please explain that statement. I am a Smalltalk novice. What makes the *language* well-suited to creating UIs. The MVC or pluggable paradigms? They are not language specific.
Dan Olsen talks about this in his new book on "Developing User Interfaces" (Morgan-Kaufman, 1998). I don't think I grok all the subtleties, but I'll try to relate the story. The self-reflective and late-binding nature of Smalltalk allows you to create views that are more de-coupled from their models. For example, when a textbox sends #getText to its model, it doesn't care what the model is, as long as it can respond to getText -- you can even swap the model at run-time, and as long as the message is answerable, it all works. Olsen contrasts this with C/C++ where the compiler requires the model and view to be linked together at compile time, the types have to match, etc. Java can do this de-coupled model-view, too, but it had to invent (overly-complex, IMHO) inner classes to make it work.
Mark
-------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html