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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

We solved this in the 90s with Motif. Then the world collectively went insane and chose AWT. History repeating as tragedy and farce.

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Win32 was a pleasure to use compared with my failed attempts to use Motif, back in the day.

Especially when wrapped with Borland's VCL (in contrast to MFC).

I was once asked to leave my comfort zone and write a Windows GUI app. Delphi saved me from the horrors of Petzold, the MFC and VB. Can confirm: it was a pleasure to layout and code in.

OWL was already quite good. It was quite sad that Borland mismanagement eventually pushed most of us into MFC world.

I don't know, I distinctly recall Motif being Not Very Fun to use.

Was it perfect? No. Was it better than learning a new toolkit for every major project? A thousand times yes.

Did Motif work on Windows?

it actually was pretty nice in my book, I wrote my thesis in Motif and I got it to run on several different unix platforms without a lot of issues. There were also some really nice commercial widget sets available, as well as things like XDesigner (iirc) for putting GUIs together.

Not saying it was super easy to use (took me a while to get drag & drop working the way I wanted, I even ended up subclassing XmText to get rectangular highlighting) but it sure was nice, I wonder what would've happened if it had not been commercial but had been available on an open licence to start with.

Can you tell me what was wrong with Motif that made everyone chose AWT?

Probably more to do with the languages - probably C/C++ for Motif and Java for AWT.

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