Widget properties

[Richmond]

Here's my 25p's worth:

Ever since widgets 'appeared' I have thought of them as second class 
citizens insofar as:

1. They are 'bits of stuff' where experts (the LiveCode team and so on) 
have done the heavy lifting
for those of us who haven't got the skill, motivation or time to work 
out how to get that sort of thing together
in LiveCode itself.

2. I certainly never get into widgets when I teach computer programming 
for a number of reasons:

2.1. While I teach children to program with LiveCode, the ultimate aim 
is to equip them with a series
of transferrable skills they can take 'to the table' of any programming 
language: the ability to drop in
a prepackaged 'does-it-for-you' add-on (one of the things that sets my 
teeth on edge about Python)
does not, as far as I am concerned, constitute computer programming as such.

Of course people might start shouting at me, at this point, and say, 
"Well then, why don't you go back to command-line
programming?", to which my riposte is, "That's why I START my 
programming with teenagers (it's a bit too much for
preteens) with BASIC programming on my BBC Micro machines I have 
lovingly curated in my school."

After a day or two with BBC BASIC on a black screen teenagers will "do 
anything for me" when they see the, supposedly,
old-fashioned LiveCode IDE and the ever-so-sexy WYSIWYG GUI.

2.2. While a LiveCode button can be examined via its property inspector, 
a widget largely cannot,
so a learner cannot really begin to understand how it is put together.

3. Widgets are, undoubtedly very clever insofar as they provide tools 
and services out of the box, and types
like myself don't have to spend an awful lot of effort working out how 
to roll our own.

4. I suppose the 'price' of a widget is just exactly that one cannot 
really get t its underpinnings (properties)
in quite the way one can withg a native LiveCode object.

Having said all this, I don't use widgets (beyond fooling around with 
them when I have a spare moment),
and on my teaching computers the widgets section of the revTools palette 
is never exposed.

Were widgets to be "integrated" into LiveCode as per buttons, fields, 
images and so forth, with properties
palettes allowing a vast number of variables to be accessible, my 
attitude towards them might change; but that
seems unlikely to happen as they are quite different beasts to buttons, 
fields, images and so on.

Best, Richmond.

On 7.04.22 9:24, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Thank you for your reply, Monte. Comments inline:
>
> Monte Goulding wrote:
> >> On 7 Apr 2022, at 11:25 am, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> >> Can you help me understand how it's better than "the properties",
> >> and why this superior method isn't used for engine controls?
> >
> > Because the array created by export and used by import contains
> > the state of the widget as is saved when saving the stack. The
> > content may or may not be the same as the property names exposed
> > to user scripts but a widget created with that state should be
> > the same as if it were saved in the stack and the stack re-opened.
>
> I've never used a widget in production yet, so I can't say I have an 
> opinion there.  If the uses for widgets are viewed as sufficiently 
> different from engine-based controls that "the properties" so many of 
> us enjoy wouldn't apply, I'm okay with that. Just looking to understand.
>
>
> >> That the company has such a narrowly specific view of the
> >> applicability of "the properties" is indeed helpful. Thank
> >> you for chiming in.
> >
> > I’m not the company.
>
> Pardon my imprecision. I think the readers here are likely aware that 
> the company is comprised of many people, and there are likely many 
> different opinions on a wide range of topics, including this.  Please 
> read that as "a significant member of the company".
>
>
> > Mark may spend a lot more time pondering the utility of `the
> > properties` than I do and indeed may have a different opinion.
> > Indeed my opinion was much closer to yours is now when I sent
> > in a PR for LC 6.1 all those years ago ;-)
>
> One of the challenges with a tool as vastly capable as LiveCode is 
> wrapping one's head around all the use-cases, and all the perceived 
> priorities.  Various members of the company and the community have 
> expressed a wide range of opinions on many things.
>
> If "the properties" winds up being like the pointer tool requests I 
> used to ask about, no worries. I stopped asking about those years ago.
>
> Indeed, even with "the properties" I've had a few discussions on this 
> with different team members going back to Dr Brett, back when LCB was 
> in its earliest stages.
>
> In my own mind having two different methods for obtaining property 
> data for two classes of objects is akin to having two different words 
> for "rect" or other basic features.  Where a useful implementation has 
> been chosen and established so long ago, it seems worth mirroring in 
> new implementations.
>
> But TBH, since I haven't used widgets in production at all, the only 
> time it comes to mind is when someone asks me about it for one of my 
> tools, or in discussions like this one. This seemed a good time to see 
> what the current vision is. I appreciate the clarity provided.
>
>
> >> How hard would it be for the team to map the existing means of
> >> extracting widget properties to "the properties”?
> >
> > I don’t think it would be particularly tricky to iterate the exported
> > property definitions to come up with a list of property names then
> > turn that into a key/value array. Whether it would provide the utility
> > you are looking for is a separate question.
>
> If it does what "the properties" does it would suit my needs.
>