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Comment by ctstover | Hacker News Reader

It was GPL (or pay license) to start with. I believe you mean you wonder if it had been LGPL to start with. Subtle, yet enormous difference for a library.

As to the speculation, I don't know. Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd. The signals and sockets paradigm is a mixed bag. Plus there are serious trade offs to the entire application framework vs a library choices in the first place. On the other hand, the runtime type system and heavily stylized macro style of GTK's gobject system was certainly an odd duck to say the least.

Personally, between the web, mobile, "modern" UX/UI ideas, desktops that want to be tablets, etc, I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed. Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever.

Where things are going from here?

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> It was GPL (or pay license) to start with.

No, it was originally not open-source at all, and it was QPL (which was just barely open-source, and crucially GPL-incompatible) for a long time. Of course we're talking a decade ago now.

Heh. Qt was released in 1995 and the The Cathedral and the Bazaar was released in 1997 with the OSI being formed in 1998. This means Qt pre-dates the term 'open source' by approximately 3 years!

Well, to be fair, Qt was aware of the free software movement from near the beginning. Richard Stallman tried to convince them to liberate their code, and resulted in pushing for a free software replacement. The existence of that free software replacement forced Qt's hand and they released their code under the LGPL. The OSI, Eric S. Raymond and the other "open source" people were not involved AFAIK.

I was part of the Qt community at the time (and still am) and that's really not how it happened.

So give a more informed account

> Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever.

By mainstream do you mean the 1% desktop share or in the GNU/Linux world?

Actually it was this PDP-11 mentality one of the reasons I eventually moved back into Windows / Mac OS X worlds.

I had my share of CLI starting with Timex 2068, AmigaDOS, MS-DOS, multiple UNIX flavours in the 80 - 90's, to keep doing it daily in the 21st century.

Xerox PARC REPLs were way more interesting way of interacting with the computer and live in modern IDEs.

Obviously I having some fun with it. Developer/technician/hacker users a different audience. In my office for instance, people can use 'doz/osx/nix. If you walk around, 95% of every monitor you see has at least one terminal open. These are people doing totally different types of work for all sorts of projects.

I am a developer.

And being one doesn't mean I am obliged to love a UNIX CLI.

I love Xerox's REPLs, Powershell and scripting languages.

I didn't actually say unix cli. Powershell is cli.

In the context of Qt vs GTK, I assumed CLI == GNU/Linux CLI.

> Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd.

You should see Unreal Engine, which uses preprocessing to extend C++ with a garbage collector, reflection, interfaces, and runtime class objects.

This might be interesting to you: https://woboq.com/blog/reflection-in-cpp-and-qt-moc.html

It is - thanks for sharing!

My god, why not just make your own language at that point?

I suspect a lot of the creative uses of C++ in Qt will fade over time as C++11/14/17 support in compilers improves. There are more options in the language now that would allow the project to move away from so many macros, etc.

I hope you're right. It's hard reasoning about large qt projects that use special external qt tools like moc compiler.

I was under the impression that it was only at v2.2 that they finally GPL'd it. Prior it was there "QPL" license. Regardless valid points. I'll always wonder though :)

> Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever.

No they are not -- mobile interfaces are the complete opposite of CLI, and they're more popular than anything else in absolute numbers.

CLI wins on the desktop because its flexibility allows for easier automation of "work", stuff humans don't really want to do, stuff that is still predominantly carried out with keyboard-based workstations (desktops and laptops). What you refer to is basically mainstream OS developers finally recognizing that first-class automation support via text interfaces is extremely efficient for power users in professional settings -- hence the rise of Powershell and the demise of graphic-based alternatives like Apple's Automator.

But that's it. For everything else, graphical icon-based interfaces are much more popular: they allow for easier exploration and are more finger-friendly.

> I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed

I think you are vastly overestimating the actual "exploration" that occurred over this time.

Windowing toolkits have extremely high barriers to entry as well as high networking effects.

The whole idea of a very hierarchical, single-threaded entity controlling all of your user interaction is very much anathema to modern CPU's. However, we are stuck with it because a new windowing toolkit would take a huge amount of effort.

I would say it's reasonably fair to call Qt's moc system "odd". Not the worst thing in the world. But you'd probably be interested to know that there are some working on experimental fork of Qt replacing the moc and a few other necessary-oddities with C++11 constructs http://www.copperspice.com/

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