Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> In Haskell, I can fire up Glade, paint my UI, save it, and then write 
>> maybe 6 lines of code in Haskell, hit compile, and I've got a GUI 
>> application.
> 
> Same in C#.  Actually, you don't have to write any code at all. The 
> boilerplate is created for you. What do you think Glade is doing, if not 
> generating boilerplate.

Actually it saves the GUI description as an XML file, which your program 
then loads and parses at runtime.

> When you want to (for example) code a Windows service, or a plug-in for 
> a web browser, or a custom type for a SQL server, you're going to have 
> more boilerplate to hook those two together.

Now, see, to me these kinds of tasks all belong to the set of things 
which are "impossible" in the first place, so I guess I don't tend to 
think about it. You can't write web browser plugins unless you're a C 
programmer, unfortunately.

> A sufficiently advanced language can turn any "boilerplate" into 
> "library code", but that's generally done by having the compiler running 
> library code at compile time.  Hence, LISP macros, FORTH dictionaries, 
> etc. An IDE does that for languages where the syntax doesn't include 
> running arbitrary code at compile time.

Heh, maybe.

-- 
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