site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2887 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats