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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there are GUI widget systems not based on deep inheritance trees.

It seems to me that GUI and OO are deeply synergetic.

It's only slightly oversimplifying to say that OO was invented for a GUI, namely Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad in the early '60s, and then developed with direct correspondence to physical objects in mind (Simula 67)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula

- The Development of the Simula Languages in HOPL I if you can get it, else http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~ldant/datascope/simula%20history.p...

Sketchpad was prototype based, simula was early class based (though they didn't use those terms yet). It's likely they were developed mostly independently; OO just arises naturally when design is based on linguistic concepts like subjects, nouns, and things they can do.

What we know of UI today is more an artifact of smalltalk (both the first GUIs and smaltalk came out of parc and were related).

This is no accident. Smalltalk was developed at Xerox PARC and included an MVC interface toolkit. http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/mvc.html

I think the functional people took a whack at this question with functional, reactive programming. Some links:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2672791/is-functional-gui...

http://blog.reactiveprogramming.org/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1028250/what-is-functiona...

Maybe some of these would interest you? https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librari...

React, sort of, if you ignore the underlying clusterfuck that is the DOM.

https://github.com/swannodette/om

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets ?

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