Don Hopkins

This looks very nice, I've been a fan of constraint-based systems for some time.

I was surprised not to see any reference to at least some of all the previous work, such as the arc from ThingLab[1] to Cassowary[2] that led to commercial systems such as Apple's Autolayout[3]. Or the Garnet[4]/Amulet[5] systems, with lessons learned[6]. Or Feiner's Drawing with Constraints[7]

You also initially write that the alternative to constraints is to position manually/numerically, but that obviously isn't true, as you have link to the code to do it procedurally later. In the same vein, you initially claim that you can't have abstraction without constraints, but that's also obviously not true when you have procedural abstraction.

You do say that the constraint code is "nicer", and I would probably agree with you, it would probably help to focus on that difference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThingLab

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_(software)

[3] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/index.html

[4] https://medium.com/@donhopkins/constraints-and-prototypes-in-garnet-and-laszlo-84533c49c548

[5] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~amulet/amulet-papers.html

[6] https://www.isi.edu/~szekely/contents/papers/2001/lessons-learned-2002toplas.pdf

[7] https://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Papers/Gleicher/CMU/briar.pdf

Related: Sun had a demo for NeWS (fancy desktop display system) called PizzaTool. Don Hopkins did a writeup: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797

(One question: that writeup says Solaris 2, but I think I might've used PizzaTool under OpenWindows 2.0 on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun4c.)

Inspired by PizzaTool at the time, but my employer having a gazillion dollars of workstations and servers, yet none with a fax card (and my group having daily ad hoc lunch outings), I wrote LunchTool for the Suns. It was a GUI with a database of local lunch places, which someone could choose to decide on a lunch location and time and such, then print a fancy announcement sign to hang where everyone would see it. (Not everyone checked email, and I liked typesetting and programming PostScript anyway.) I was most proud of the bitmap burger icon.

When Google first solicited third-party apps for Android (it might've been a contest?), I almost stole the idea of PizzaTool, since it still seemed like a fun idea, as a gimmick or experience. Not that one really needed to see composited pineapple bits, to know whether they wanted it on their real-world pizza, but I thought the visual made adding toppings fun, and not a bad early demo for Android.

"X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly." -Steve Strassman, Unix-Haters Handbook

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25734498

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47