Hi all,

Perhaps a stupid question. Some time ago, I received a rpi zeroW as a gift, but as I did not have any use for ii I passed it to somebody else in our electronics-group. Now, that person has had a +30 year carreer as self-taught programmer -starting out with BASIC on DOS machines- so he showed of some of his old BASIC applications in dosbox on the pi.

So far so good, but he had an interesting question: Years ago, I wrote a library in BASIC for screen / window applications in DOS. (you know, pop-up text-windows and so on). How do I do that on linux (in C)?

As I myself only do ‘backend’ coding (so no UI), I have to admit I did not have any answer to that.

So, question, For somebody who has mostly coded in BASIC (first DOS and later Visual Basic) and now switched to C and python, what is the best / most easy tool to write a basic UI application with window-function on linux/unix. I know there exist things like QT and ncurses, but I never used these, so I have no idea.

Any advice?

Kr.

  • Eheran@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    The first 2 paragraphs read a bit odd. I mean I specifically said that it is a tool that saves time and not what you put in my mouth. That is actually the whole point I made. The same way a book saves time compared to going somewhere, hearing about it and writing it down. Or using interactive programs instead of having to compile and upload code. Or using Python instead of C++ or C++ instead of assembly. Or assembly instead of straight binary or connecting wires or a punch card.

    I also specifically say that someone without prior knowledge is not going to be able to do that. The same way someone who does not understand math is not going to be able to use a calculator or Excel in an effective way.

    To take the oil change example, it is like a tutorial on how to do it yourself. But you still need to have a jack, lay on the floor, unscrew etc. But instead of having to go to a shop and learn it there, you learn it directly, which is more effective. Like reading a book about assembly instead of looking over the shoulder of the person inventing assembly. Errors can always happen and I have to say, given how much GPT improved over just 1.5 years, we are soon in the situation Wikipedia was back in the day. “Wikipedia can be edited by everyone, you can’t trust it” while in reality it was already more reliable than the encyclopedias it was getting compared to.