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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2887 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

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Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).

I have strong feelings that GUI toolkits have never been done well. All existing solutions are bad, and they’re mostly all bad in the exact same ways.

The root of the problem is smart people want to work on things where they can deliver formal results—and in many areas of software engineering, you can! Databases, type systems, even graphics to a large extent are all backed by substantial formal theory (even if the users of these technologies are largely unaware).

UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.

The OG Macintosh GUI toolkit was absolutely excellent -- a real revelation to a young programmer, and an intro to O-O done right in my case.

A port/replication of the application side of that would be an interesting OS project -- I doubt the codebase is available, but the IP issues (which led Windows down its monstrous path) should be gone by now, and it was extremely well documented.

UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.

This isn't remotely true. If you care to look at the literature, particularly slightly older, you'll find there are plenty of commonalities backed by usability research. The fact that (particularly modern) UIs so often ignore them doesn't mean the data and "theory" doesn't exist.

"Usability research" is not formal theory. It’s psychology, applied to human-computer interaction. And psychology has one of the worst track records of any field ever.

By formal theory, I mean math you can put into a theorem prover like Coq/Agda/Lean.

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