[Idea / Discussion] Glimmer up EVERYTHING! \o/ about glimmer HOT 1 CLOSED

I think you are missing a few very key points on what makes Glimmer great:

• The whole reason Glimmer DSLs are so programmer-friendly is because they are embedded into the Ruby language, which is the most programmer-friendly language in the world. If I were to generalize the Glimmer DSL into a Meta-DSL and re-implement on top of other programming languages, none of the greatness of Ruby would be there anymore. I intentionally chose Ruby after studying a number of programming languages for building Glimmer initially like Java, Python, and Scala. Ruby turned out to be far more expressive than other programming languages, and by a large margin.
• Glimmer DSLs are great because they respect the human element and humanistic differences in the various GUI toolkits by intentionally maintaining those differences of style in every Glimmer DSL. If I were to write one Meta-DSL that unifies all the Glimmer DSLs, there would be too much hard work to NEGATE all the humanistic elements of all the various GUI toolkits, like the preference of LibUI to pass the default property value to the widget directly vs the preference of SWT to pass a widget style. I respect the two different teams of software engineers that worked on LibUI and SWT, so I don't want to fight or cover up their humanity with a Meta-DSL that attempts to intentionally NEGATE their differences. I'd rather expose their humanity and have people choose the style they like the most by choosing SWT or LibUI to build their project. This is one of the few cases where there is no right answer, and I don't want to dictate a right answer or give too much configurability for the right answer either. It's better to just conform to the standards of each GUI toolkit wrapped by Glimmer
• It is better to maintain widgets in separate repositories because there wouldn't be any administrative overhead to giving everyone access to one master repository or worries about people breaking the code of others. Also, even if some repositories were abandoned, they could still be forked and extended further in the future, so there is no risk or issue there. I've been able to take over the opal-async repository for example from its original author with no problem.
• The cost of solving problems without your suggestion is cheap enough that there is no pragmatic need to build a unified meta-DSL at the moment.
• There is already a Calculator built in Glimmer: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-cs-calculator
• There is already a Glimmer IDE: Gladiator
• I do not care for building WYSIWYG app builder tools because in my experience they are way less productive than coding things by hand using a DSL (I think Glade is awful because it results in XML files, thus splitting development into multiple languages just like web development, which negates the benefits of something like Glimmer that intentionally unifies development in Ruby only). That said, I am not stopping anyone else from building such tools. Go ahead and build a Glimmer WYSIWYG editor if you like.

By the way, your idea of rebuilding all popular tools in Glimmer is a great one, and I am not standing in the way of anyone who wants to do so. In fact, you are free to build such tools and release as separate gems.

Also, about having contact_manager support other GUI toolkits (e.g. Opal), I am not against it. It's just not my top priority today, but you can contribute its reimplementation in Glimmer DSL for LibUI at least if you want.

Let me know what you think of the podcast once you've completed listening to it. Feedback is appreciated. I am closing this issue, so you can reply to it while it is closed.

from glimmer.