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Comment by tokyodude | Hacker News Reader

What a rude comment. It's not a specialized term. It's a common term. Immediate mode GUI as a concept is well known. Tens of thousands of programmers use Immediate Mode GUIs. There are several well known Immediate Mode GUI libraries used by tens of thousands of projects.

When I don't know a term I google it. I don't assume the entire world revolves around me and that it's the author job to make their article more verbose because everyone reading it might not know every term.

Here's are galleries of some from one of the more popular libraries

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/2265 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1902 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1607 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1269

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I don't think it's rude at all. I did Google "immediate mode GUI" after reading the first paragraph, because I also didn't know what it meant. The first three results were a Wikipedia snippet which didn't help my understanding at all, a Gist that begins with "Before you continue, if you don't know what IMGUI is don't bother reading this", and then third result was this HN comments section.

I would argue that "immediate mode GUI" is an extremely specialised term.

Specialised enough that I didn't come across it during my years of work on Qt. Work that included reading all the manuals, style guides and UI books we could get hold of.

> Specialised enough that I didn't come across it during my years of work on Qt.

Of course you didn't, Qt is retained.

It's a bit like imperative programming vs functional programming. Before functional programming gained any significant traction, imperative programming was just "programming".

Actually immediate mode came first, retained came later for perf reasons (redrawing the entire screen from scratch every frame is slow, even though immediate mode is easier). The original context was however graphics (OpenGL retained vs immediate modes) rather than UI (widget toolkits started out as retained, like OGL retained scene graphs, likewise canvases have always been immediate).

Of course I didn't? I filled a wall with the books I bought and didn't come across the term. What did I do wrong, what books could I have bought but didn't?

How many of those books weren't about the mainstream GUI toolkits (Qt, GTK, MFC, Cocoa, Swing…)? Has even one of those books described something that resemble "let's redraw everything every frame"? If so, how that technique was called?

> what books could I have bought but didn't?

Possibly none at all. Immediate mode anything is mostly a game dev thing, and what happens in game dev tends to stay in game dev. They don't seem to document their practices as much as other fields do.

Hence my suspicion that the authors of your books didn't even know about IMGUI. They just knew about "the" way to do GUI, which happens to involved retained state.

You're letting the tail wag the dog. You're assuming that people know terms that are used in "possibly none [no books] at all", or put differently, that the set of terms used in books for software developers is uncorrelated with the set of terms software developers may be assumed to know.

BTW, the code in Qt that draws rotated/sheared text/pixmaps was influenced in part by a book or chapter by Michael Abrash, as well as by articles in either Graphics Gems or conference papers (memory's fallible I'm afraid).

I did not find it rude and I agree that a short explanation would have been nice. I had heard the terms Immediate Mode GUI and Retained Mode GUI before but I couldn't remember the details. A short reminder would have been nice. Just a sentence.

Whoa, thanks for those links. This image from the 2265 issue is especially pretty:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/16171743/50758310-...

p.s. I did get a chuckle from your deleted comment that suggested I was living in a cave. After the heat wave we've had here the last couple of days, I wish I were living in a nice cool cave! ;-)

Wow. That looks a lot like the EVE Online UI: http://i.imgur.com/EM12xXZ.png

I knew the term and I didn't find the comment particularly rude, even if I don't agree with it fully.

I agree that the docs could have been improved by providing some sort of definition. But I think something as simple as a link to wikipedia could have been enough.

I also agree that the intended target audience will most likely already be aware of immediate vs retained. Adding the aforementioned link would not have hurt said audience anyway.

He wasn't rude, he politely asked people writing articles to try to be more descriptive. However, in my decades in the industry, I've never heard of "Immediate mode GUI" or "retained mode". Not once in 30+ years. I can't be that common.

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