1. Introduction

What's MINOS?

MINOS is the answer to the question ``Is there something like Visual BASIC (Microsoft) or Delphi (Inprise) in Forth?'' - and the answer is ``yes''.

Basically, these GUI RADs contain two components: a library with a wide variety of elements for a graphical user interface; e.g. windows, buttons, edit-controls, drawing areas, etc.; and an editor to combine the elements with the mouse by drag&drop or click&point actions. Missing code then is inserted to add actions when buttons are pressed.

Typical applications are often related to data base access. Therefore, many of these systems already contain a data base engine or at least a standardized interface to a data base, such as ODBC.

Another aspect are complex components. With some of these toolkits, you can create a web browser with some mouse clicks and a few keystrokes. However, these components hide their details, a shrink wrapped web browser application is not necessarily worse.

The interactivity of these tools usually is not very high. You create your form, write your actions as code and compile it more (Delphi) or less (Visual Age for C++) fast. Trying it usually isn't possible before the compiler run.

Why Visual?

It isn't really necessary to brush graphical user interfaces together, as it isn't to edit texts WYSIWYG. Many typesetting functions are more semantically than visual, e.g. a text is a headline or emphasized instead of written in bold 18 point Garamond or 11 point Roman italics. All this is true for user interfaces, to some extend much more. It's not the programmer that decides which font and size to use for the UI - that's up to the user. As is color of buttons and texts.

Also to layout individual widgets, more abstraction than defining position, width and height makes sense. Typically buttons are arranged horizontally or vertically, perhaps with a bit distance between them. The size of buttons must follow the containing strings, and should conform to aesthetics (e.g. each button in a row has the same width).

Such an abstract model, related to TeX's boxes&glues, programs quite good even without a visual editor. The programmer isn't responsible for ``typesetting'' the buttons and boxes. This approach is quite usual in Unix. Motif and Tcl/Tk use neighborhood relations, Interviews uses boxes&glues. I decided for boxes&glues, since it's a fast and intuitive solution, although it needs more objects to get the same result.

These concepts contradict somehow with a graphical editing process, since the editors I know don't provide abstract concepts (``place left of an object'' or ``place in a row''), but positions.

Visual Forth?

One point makes me think: the packets that allow real visual form programming have many years of programming invested in. Microsoft, Borland, and IBM may hire hundreds of programmers just for one such project. This man-power isn't available for any Forth project. But stop:

1. Forth claims that good programmers can work much more efficient with Forth
2. A team of 300 (wo)men blocks itself. If the boss partitions the work, the programmers need to document functions, and to read documents from other programmer related to other functions and must understand them, or ask questions to figure things out. Everybody knows that documenting takes much longer than writing the code, and explaining is even worse. Thus at a certain project complexity level, no time is left for the programming task; all time is used to specify planned functions and read the specification from other programmers. Or the programmers just chat before the door holes of the much too small and noisy cubicles.
3. A good programmer reportedly works 20 times as fast as a bad, even though he can't type in more key strokes per time. The resulting program is either up to 20 times shorter or has 20 times less bugs (or both) - with more functionality at the same time. Teamwork however prevents good programmers from work, since they are frustrated by bad programmers surrounding them, from their inability to produce required information in time; and the bad programmers are frustrated by the good ones, which makes them even worse.
4. Therefore, even in large projects, the real work is (or should be) done by a small ``core team''. Then the Dilbert rule applies: what can be done with two people, can be done with one at half of the costs.

Finally I wanted to get rid of DOS, and port bigFORTH to a real operating system (Linux). In contrast to Windows and OS/2, user interface and screen access are separated there. Drawing on the screen uses the X Window System (short X), the actual user interface is implemented in a library. This is the reason, why there is no common interface, but a lot of different libraries, such as Athena Widgets, Motif, Tcl/Tk, xforms, Qt, gtk, and others. The ``look and feel'' from Motif-like buttons is quite common, even Windows and MacOS resemble it.

All these libraries have disadvantages. The Athena Widgets are hopelessly outdated. Motif is commercial, even if a free clone (Lesstif) is in creation. It's slow and a memory hog. Tcl/Tk consumes less memory, but it's even slower. How do you explain your users that drawing a window takes seconds, while Quake renders animated 3D-graphic on the same machine? Qt is fast, but it's written in C++ and doesn't have a foreign language interface now. gtk, the GIMP toolkit, has more foreign language interfaces, and it's free, but it wasn't available until recently.

Therefore I decided to port the widget classes from bigFORTH-DOS to X, and write an editor for it. Such classes written in Forth naturally fit in an development environment and are - from the Forth point of view - easier to maintain. There are not such many widget libraries in C, because it's a task written in an afternoon, but because the available didn't fit the requests, and a modification looked desperate.

The Name - Why MINOS?

``Visual XXX'' is an all day's name, and it's too much of a microsoftism for me. ``Forth'' is a no-word, especially since the future market consists of one billion Chinese, and for them four is a number of unluck (because ``se'' (four) sounds much like ``se'' (death)). However, even Borland doesn't call their system ``Visual TurboPascal'', but ``Delphi''.

Greek is good, anyway, since this library relates to the boxes&glues model of TeX, which is pronounced Greek, too. Compared with Motif, the library is quite copact (MINimal), and since it's mainly for Linux, the phonetic distance is small... I pronounce it Greek: ``meenoz''.

Port to Windows