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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if a GUI programming benchmark had GUI specifications with reasonable UX? The 7GUIs designs are criminally bad, especially CRUD and Circle drawer.

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Then you'd need more complex implementations, which would be more difficult to compare, muddying up the point of the exercise: to produce various comparible implementations.

I don’t believe that the UX problems here are motivated by reducing complexity. Perhaps the circle drawer one, where any reasonable redesign would turn it into a direct manipulation GUI, but honestly direct manipulation is table stakes and something that you must be able to implement, and not really that complex in most cases.

The CRUD example is just bad for no reason. It looks like a typical master-detail view, but the detail view doesn’t give any feedback when the selection in the list changes.

Hmm. Well, that circle-drawer is indeed atrocious. But its atrocity is according to the design spec. It says to use a modal window with a slider. Everyone's supposed to build the same thing. Your criticisms should go 'upstream' to the original 7GUIs task specifier, eugenkiss (whose domain has been hijacked by some gambling operation, onoes!)

eta: Bad UX granted, I gather that the task is meant to compare DX. (And it'd be useful for comparing coding approaches by individuals, for evaluating interview candidates. For that purpose, it'd perhaps be useful to be able to test a person's particular design choices, and how they interpret the spec, perhaps to see if they are justified in building something not-quite-to-spec.)

eta2: https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/tasks#circle

Man, look how detailed this is. I suppose some people's job as developers is to literally implement specs exactly. Glad that's not my job. But maybe some folks would prefer not to have to deal with ambiguity.

Yes, my criticism is about 7GUIs as benchmark, that’s right there in my first post.

Yeah, this benchmark is way too specific. Would be much more interesting to see how different implementations could take advantage of their frameworks. Eg. some frameworks may make it easy to use animations, or they may have reusable components like date pickers. And of course they should take the target device in account - phone apps should look different from desktop apps, and they would probably also look different from control interfaces on industrial equipment.

They are pretty windows 95ish.

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