Re: Our self-presentation, not just on our website. (Was: Re: GS based app release: djay by Algoriddim in Beta)

[Daniel Boyd]

For what it’s worth, I think we also need to shift our priorities and 
expectations in our new ChatGPT reality. I recently coded a perl/wxwidgets app. 
I have some old perl code and I have been wanting to add a GUI to it forever. 
My point is that I was never able to get off the ground with wxperl. Until now. 
My (former) problem was that there is approximately zero documentation for 
wxperl.  You are basically expected to just read the C++ documentation and just 
figure out how they may have happened to translate that into perl. 

But now, documentation suddenly matters a lot less because ChatGPT could answer 
just about all of my questions. And provide sample code.

I think this will have a big impact on GNUstep. When I was first getting 
started with gnustep development, I remember the learning curve being high—in 
many ways because I couldn’t always find an answer in the documentation. That 
hurdle is largely removed by ChatGPT. I expect this to increase the number of 
people using the framework bc the barriers to entry have been lowered.

Another area where I think this will have an impact—there’s a big learning 
curve to get to where you can contribute useful patches to the core GNUstep 
libraries. I suspect ChatGPT could be a game changer there as well. 

So, Svetlana—a suggestion: why don’t you use GPT and see if you can develop a 
proposed patch to the gui library for some of the things you suggest. Smooth 
animation would probably be a substantial lift, but perhaps some of the others 
might not be. It would obviously need to go through a QC review before getting 
incorporated into the codebase, but perhaps it could at least be a first step 
towards getting a usable patch. 

I think we users need to stop thinking that we can’t provide useful patches for 
the core libraries. So that’s my prediction: we will see an uptick in users and 
also an uptick in people wanting to work on the framework itself.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 3, 2023, at 04:57, Svetlana Tkachenko 
> <svetlana.tkachenko@fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Albert
> 
> From your list, as I am not much of a tinkerer, issue "Changing the system 
> font or font size causes applications (especially buttons) to be inexplicably 
> cut off." is also present on my system.
> 
> I also liked elementary OS but found it harder to pick up their programming. 
> I did not see any modularity in it, whereas GNUstep offers shared modules 
> between several applications. Correct me if I am wrong. (Even if this is 
> wrong, gnustep still has a point of mac compatibility, which elementary does 
> not)
> 
> Hope it helps others with priorities.
> 
> Regards
> -- 
> Svetlana
>