29 Oct
2018
29 Oct
'18
6:38 p.m.
Message: 28
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2018 13:16:44 -0400
From: "Jeffrey S. Worley" <technoid6502 at gmail.com>
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: "Object Oriented GUI"
Message-ID: <01e83dac0a96469e425a0632bd07319351c9362d.camel at Gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
I used OS/2 from 1993 to 2003 almost exclusively. It has the most
beautiful GUI on the planet, is object-oriented to a fault, and is the
target of all the claims Microsoft was making with regard to the
Object-orientedness of their new windows 95.
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell mentions some
important attributes of a truely object-oriented gui.
Someone mentioned inheritance and polymorphism. These are two products
of true object oriented gui design. Applications inherit the ability
to manipulate and use whatever objects exist in the system. A word
processor is not limited to just text files, for example, or to only
the files the programmer originally set out for it. The system allows
the applications to grow in functionality as new object types are
developed/assembled by other applications or the user.
All these years later, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what
the purpose of that in an OS/desktop environment/file-manager context
is. I guess that, say, you could have new file types implement their
own methods for things like printing, so the OS doesn't have to know
the details of the document structure or require a particular
application installed to be able to print it, but this seems like an
awfully limited use case to me - sure, it would be nice to have things
like audio and video codecs be universal and pluggable or things like
that, but I have a hard time seeing how it's all that revolutionary,
and I can easily see it being just as limiting as other non-OOP format
standards (after all, it's not going to magically add functionality
that the file format itself doesn't support, is it? And doesn't it
ultimately just come down to diking out a chunk of the application
code for the OS to use? What if two different programs both offer
their own handlers for the same file type?)