Programming languages and the GUI

Programming languages and GUIs don't mix. Of all the languages available today, none are GUI-based languages.

My test for a GUI-based language is the requirement that any program written in the language must use a GUI. If you can write a program and run it in a text window, then the language is not a GUI-based language.

This is an extreme test, and perhaps unfair. But it shows an interesting point: We have no GUI-based languages.

We had programming before the GUI with various forms of input and output (punch cards, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk files, printers, and terminals). When GUIs came along, we rushed to create GUI programs but not GUI programming languages. (Except for Visual Basic.) We still have GUIs, some thirty years on, and today we have no GUI programming languages.

Almost all programming languages treat windows (or GUIs) as a second thought. Programming for the GUI is bolted on to the language as a library or framework; it is not part of the core language.

For some languages, the explanation is obvious: the language existed before GUIs existed (or became popular). Languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, Pascal, and C had been designed before GUIs appeared on the horizon. Cobol and Fortran were designed in an era of magnetic tapes, disk files, and printers. Pascal and C were created for printing terminals or "smart" CRT terminals such as DEC's VT-52.

Some languages were designed for a specific purpose. Such languages have no need of GUIs, and they don't have any GUI support. AWK was designed as a text processing language, a filter that fit in with Unix's tool-chain philosophy. SQL was designed for querying databases (and prior to GUIs).

Other languages were designed after the advent of the GUI, and for general-purpose programming. Languages such as Java, C#, Python, and Ruby came to life in the "graphical age", yet graphics is an extension of the language, not part of the core.

Microsoft extended C++ with its Visual C++ package. The early versions were a daunting mix of libraries, classes, and #define macros. Recent versions are more palatable, but C++ remains C++ and the GUI parts are mere add-ons to the language.

Borland extended Pascal, and later provided Delphi, for Windows programming. But Object Pascal and Windows Pascal and even Delphi were just Pascal with GUI programming bolted on to the core language.

The only language that put the GUI in the language was Visual Basic. (The old Visual Basic, not the VB.NET language of today.) These languages not only supported a graphical display, they required it.

I realize that there may be niche languages that handle graphics as part of the core language. Matlab and R support the generation of graphics to view data -- but they are hardly general-purpose languages. (One would not write a word processor in R.)

Mathematica and Wolfram do nice things with graphics too, but again, for rendering numerical data.

There are probably other obscure languages that handle GUI programming. But they are obscure, not mainstream. The only other (somewhat) popular language that required a graphical display was Logo, and that was hardly a general-purpose language.

The only popular language that handled the GUI as a first-class citizen was Visual Basic. It is interesting to note that Visual Basic has declined in popularity. Its successor, VB.NET is a rough translation of C# and the GUI is, like other languages, something added to the core language.

Of course, programming (and system design) today is very different from the past. We design and build for mobile devices and web services, with some occasional web applications. Desktop applications are considered passe, and console applications are not considered at all (except perhaps for system administrators).

Modern applications place the user interface on a mobile device. The server provides services, nothing more. The GUI has moved from the desktop PC to the web browser and now to the phone. Yet we have no equivalent of Visual Basic for developing phone apps. The tools are desktop languages with extensions for mobile devices.

When will we get a language tailored to phones? And who will build it?