Re: [LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

Emanuel Rumpf wrote:

An application that has a slick, polished GUI full of 'eye candy' always makes me wonder that they put all their effort into the GUI, and the internals are all messed up.

You need a balance. And the smaller the development team, the less is available to achieve that balance. So I'd rather have the team put its effort into making the engine run well rather than putting a custom paint job on it.

My opinion about software architecture: every app should be written in two parts. The first is the back end that does all the real work, and comes complete with a documented API usable from as many other languages as possible. (If the API was usable from Java or Javascript, you could even have a web UI for the app.) The second is the front end, the UI. If the two parts are properly separated, you can have as many different UIs for the application as there are people who care to program a UI for it. So you can have a complex advanced UI for the experienced user with great domain knowledge, you can have a simple "Beginniners" UI (such as a 'Wizard" style UI) for the casual for first time user, you can have a text UI for blind or visually-challenged users, etc. You can even have the back end run on a completely different machine such as a server, and have the UI running on a client workstation; quite useful for such situations as a smartphone UI client that can tap the hardware of the backend for the heavy lifting. SuperCollider works like that. Seems like good futureproofing to me, without locking things into a particular language for the UI.