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Things I have never written : #2

12 November 2005 21:50

KDE

I have never once written anything using Qt. Why not? I have no real dislike of the toolkit, license, or implementation language. It just hasn't ever been necessary or appropriate for me to use it.

Generally speaking I only dabble with coding online applications in Perl/PHP (Perl is my preference, sometimes I get suckered into using PHP). Any software which I've needed to write with a GUI usually ends up being coded using the raw X11 libraries (xlib, etc).

A few times I've needed to have something be stable, sharable, and GUI-driven and xlib didn't cut it I've chosen to use the GTK libraries. Mostly that has been down to three reasons:

  • Finding small examples of code is very simple; as it is well-used.
    • By contrast many Qt applications are larger pieces of code. Finding examples using the functions you're interested in is harder.
  • I love C++, but generally I develop in Perl, or C.
  • I don't have to worry about the moc preprocessor, writing Makefiles, etc.

I'm sure that sometime in the future I will experiment with Qt, and possibly even install KDE to try it out. But it won't be soon.

(I think that desktop environments are a good thing, and can be attractive, productive, and useful. However I've only used Gnome briefly and tend to stick with the more lightweight IceWM environment).

Once upon a time I did install and tinker with KDevelop, but nothing much came of it. When I lost my desktop machine due to hardware failure I didn't feel the need to re-install it. Instead I stuck to using GNU Emacs + Vim for editing code.

Right now I've written that I shall go back to shaving my head. To make me look more like my avatar.

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