Lambda the Ultimate

Is Office 12's GUI 'declarative' in the same sense as CTM's declarative GUI (Adobe is supposed to have a similar api)

Declarative guis are good, since they are easier to use, but who is going to implement the results? what if the results I have to select from do not include the thing I am looking for? We are back to the stateful OO paradigm in that case (select object - send message).

What I would like to see from Word is to be more like functional programming, i.e. stong typing and no destructive updates.

Let's take Microsoft Word, for example: bold characters can be selected anywhere, even in styles that bold does not make sense. A style can be destructively updated in one place, and thus create havoc in the rest of the document. Word makes it more difficult by allowing the user to select 'copy-on-write' for styles, i.e. if a style is automatically updated or not. It's like a variable in programming languages: if the variable's content changes, the rest of the program sees the new value, whereas if a new value is used, the rest of the program is not broken.

Instead of being like that, Word should have been like this: the user creates types, i.e. document elements, with each element having a specific style configuration. Elements can be freely mixed, creating new types, which are added to the user's type library. A type should be strong, i.e. if modified it is modified for all documents that it is used for. Thus the actual document becomes a type, i.e. a specific configuration of styles, rather than a randomly-chosen series of special marking characters.

Not only Word documents would be more consistent, but they would be much easier to manage, much easier to categorize, they would take much less memory, document types could be handled separately and managed from a single point in a distributed enviroment (for example, changing a company's logo would be automatic in all new documents) etc.

I think it's a question of specifying goals through successive approximation (in order for this to be tolerable, there has to be a good chance of one of the options on offer being the one you want first time). Richard Dawkins' biomorphs program on the BBC B enabled you to "design" virtual insects in the same way. The sun, having no option, shines on the nothing new.

Note that, in order to be displayed for selection, the results (or a representative sample of them, as when you play with filters in the GIMP) must already have been computed prior to being chosen. So the most obvious PL angle - goal-driven programming - doesn't really seem to apply here.

The design of a visual interface for specifying constraints that must then be satisfied seems like quite an interesting problem; I'm just not sure that that's the problem the new MS Office interface is trying to solve.