Re: Weep fo GNUstep

[Matt Campbell]

Hello James:

This is hardly constructive.  How, specifically, do you think GNUstep 
could be improved?

Here is why I care about GNUstep, though I am a late-comer to this 
community, and not very actively involved (yet).

1.  It aims for parity with the native toolkit of a mainstream platform 
(OS X).  True, WINE does the same for Windows, but see the next point.

2.  Said API has a unified object-oriented foundation, unlike the mess 
we have on Windows.

3.  This API is more friendly to dynamic languages than wxWidgets, GTK, 
or Qt, let alone the mess of API's on Windows.  By dynamic languages, I 
mean languages like Python, Ruby, Lua, Io, Smalltalk, and even 
JavaScript.  Unlike the other toolkits I mentioned, Cocoa and GNUstep 
don't require you to write, or even generate, bindings for every object.

4.  The GNUstep Renaissance project is useful even to developers who 
only care about Cocoa, especially for developers who don't want to (or 
can't) use Interface Builder or Gorm.

I know the GNUstep team is addressing the problem of aesthetics, so if 
this isn't possible already, you should eventually be able to make 
GNUstep apps look the way you want.  Especially apps that use 
Renaissance instead of the fixed layouts produced by Gorm. 
(Incidentally, it saddens me that GNUstep newcomers are still attracted 
to Gorm rather than Renaissance.)

True, GNUstep is short on contributors.  Is this your primary concern?

You say GNUstep could have been great.  It can be still.  But what, 
exactly, does this mean to you?

Matt