Re: GUI question

"zznmeb" <[email protected]> Sun, 10 May 2009 03:12:14 -0000

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.programming.language-of-the-year
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

--- In [email protected], "quills566" <quills566@...> wrote:
>
> Hi all, 
> 
> Non-programmer here... Can a programmer tell from the interface what language a database application was written in?
> 
> (I'm a writer, this is background research for a subject I know little about--yet.)
> 
> Thanks, Karen
>

Well ... without looking at the code, probably not. There are two components to a GUI application -- the language, and the GUI toolkit. An expert GUI programmer can undoubtedly tell which toolkit was used just by looking at the interface. But nearly all of the toolkits have a native C/C++ mode, plus bindings for the major scripting languages -- Perl, Python and Ruby.

The exception would be the Java "Swing" toolkit. It's usually easily recognized, and the underlying code is usually Java, although there are bindings for other languages.