Such things are self evidently _good_things_. You can't blame the tools if the results are crap. There will aways be people capable of using the finest tools to turn out rubbish. But with easy tools there will be more doing it, which means although theres more rubbish, theres also more great stuff.

They said easy to use synthesisers and audio tools would ruin music. Theres a lot more music, lots of its very bad, but the best of it is better than ever.
They said simple scripted open games engines would ruin the quality of games design. There has never been such a wealth of creative activity from the mod scene pushing the field forward
Tools that popularise a practice are to be welcomed. They move the programmer one step further up the ladder of abstaction and closer to a wider less specialised parlence they can share with more people. Personally I would probably use such a tool. I take no pleasure in GUI design once a program functions. I think the equivilent Motif builder I used years ago was called Masai.
btw, it goes without saying I'm with Antonio on this, a properly constructed program should operate independently of its interface, think loose coupling. It should, in the best of cases be trivial to swap out a CLI for a GUI, or file/config based interface to script the thing. If your gubbins has all the right hooks, who cares how the data gets to and from it?


In reply to Re: GUI builders, good or bad? by andyf
in thread GUI builders, good or bad? by Trag

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.