Re: GTK+ brochure for FOSDEM

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

I don't see much of a debate there. Most people want to solve a problem, and start from the problem, not from the tool to solve it, it's not like home improvers go "hey there's this really nice drilling machine, I should buy some shelves to learn how to use it".

People who are likely to use GTK will start from the problem they want to solve and are in need for a graphical toolkit to draw widgets that do what they want. Quite frankly advertising C/GObject as the reference language for newcomers is something we already agreed was not recommended during the UX hackfest and that's why we decided to choose _javascript_ as the entry point. Point them at what the toolkit does and the easiest way to use it, and people will learn as they go. GObject and GIO by themselves are of no interest for most people wanting to write apps, specially in C.

2015-01-23 18:05 GMT+00:00 Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>:

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 09:27:37AM -0800, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> > The learning path for writing a GTK+ application should be: GLib ->
> > GObject (at least the basis) -> a bit of GIO -> and finally GTK+. All
> > GTK+ widgets are GObject classes! we cannot ignore GObject… For me it's
> > important to explain what it is, at least briefly.
>
> I disagree. The learning path for writing a GTK+ app should start with GTK+
> and let them venture into the utility libraries of GLib and Gio when they
> need to. No need to start with "here's the library that seemingly reinvents
> all of C99 because people sometimes still use SunCC in TYOOL 2015".

It's all the debate between the bottom-up and top-down approaches. Maybe
a good compromise is a mix between the two, because it's more fun to
show a window with three buttons than learning how to create a signal.
But sooner or later a developer needs to know GLib and GObject.

For a potential book about GTK+, there can be a short chapter on GLib to
learn the basis, then an introduction to GTK+ with some basic
explanations on how to _use_ a GObject class, then a chapter to know how
to _write_ GObject classes. For what it's worth it was roughly the path
chosen in GGAD.

Sébastien
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--

Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz