I have a number of years experience working with Tcl, and also a bit of Tk, which fits the bill nicely for that kind of thing.
However... yeah, doing client apps is not "where it's at" compared to web apps. I never thought I would say that. Web apps were, once upon a time, sort of ugly and boring compared to all the cool stuff you could do with 'real' apps. But with things like Rails, and the ability to easily deploy new versions, the world has changed, and web apps are "where it's at", in a lot of ways.
If you're interested in using Tcl and Tk, I could send out a few feelers to that community. Lots of them aren't really in the YC 'demographic' (older, families, etc...), but some of them are pretty sharp coders.
GUIs just aren't interesting to create -- there's nothing challenging about creating them. For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work.
The same is true about web interfaces, of course, but they at least have hype behind them, and therefore they're picked up by trendy young coders. Plus, there's the challenge -- or, IMO, endless pain -- of actually making it work across multiple browsers.
There is certainly an art to making a good, usable interface, but it's not a typical programmer's challenge, and writing a UI by hand is simply a pain in the ass. It sucks to do the stupid connections and packing if you don't have a drag and drop layout tool. And once you have that, you start leaving the programmer's domain, and into the designer's domain.
Note, I'm only talking about interfaces. The logic behind them can be anything, but it's the same logic with a web or desktop frontend.
I think it's just that once the shine wore off of the "hey, I can make buttons!" thing, the highly motivated programmers realized that UI design wasn't something that they wanted to focus on -- it's better left to designers (in theory at least -- im reality it's probably left to lowly grunt programmers) who can make the UI with drag and drop GUI builders, leaving them to work on interesting technical challenges. Making a GUI tends to be incidental to the core of the problem. I suspect that if it wasn't for the shine factor in web apps, it would have the exact same sort of apathy that you see in most programmers about desktop GUIs.
"GUIs just aren't interesting to create -- there's nothing challenging about creating them. For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work."
Oh, so very wrong. Yes, technically, the mechanics of making a GUI are not hard, but it's much like good technical writing. Deciding what goes where, what goes in, what stays, out; these are hard choices. Just look at almost any random shareware VB app. Fugly.
Agreed. My secret shame is that I love tinkering with GUI and trying new things. I have a deep dissatisfaction for most GUI apps out there, and I take a lot of time when I write my apps to try and get it right.
Most coders simply aren't meticulous enough when it comes to interfaces. "Slap a button on the window" or "just throw an item in the menu" without thought are not usable solutions.
This is especially problematic in client-side software where marketing is only interested in bullet-point features. The accessibility and workflow behind these features tend to be suspect at best, downright unusable at worst.
I wish more coders would be interested in these things. The people I talk to about interfaces are either disinterested hackers who'd rather work on backend code, or artists with no conceptual grasp of the technical underpinnings of GUI. Ugh.
I was talking from a coding point of view, since the post was asking about finding people to code a GUI. The challenge of designing a good UI is usually swamped by the need to write swaths of dumb code if you're actually coding GUIs. Design work is in a domain of it's own.
I would say that unless you're making command line programs or AI the most important part of an application is the GUI. It is all your customers see, and if it doesn't work nothing else matters much.
It's not unimportant. It's just menial and trivial when done in code. Yes, there's an art to it, but that's not a technical challenge in the programming domain. The outside veneer is important, but it's not interesting to work on from a technical viewpoint. And furthermore, it's best left to UI experts to design -- any sane GUI designer makes it easy enough for 90% of the UI to be done by drag and drop. (Yep. No sane GUI designers that I've seen yet exist for web apps,partly because there's no standard GUI toolkit.)
It's not like mechanical engineers spend the majority of their time deciding on the trim and positioning of internals which compose the interface to the car. Instead they collaborate with the designers the constraints on the interior layout, and then they leave the interface details to the designers, while working on the drivetrain, suspension, frame, and so on.
The point I'm making isn't that GUIs are unimportant. The point is that GUIs are uninteresting if you are looking for a technically challenging problem to solve with code. This lack of challenge can be compounded today with the trend towards designers providing specs to programmers, and then leaving the programmers to implement it, as the creative element is reduced.
> For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work... [t]he same is true about web interfaces...
I wish it were true for web interfaces... something like balsamiq.com, but it would output html (or haml, etc.) instead of xml.
However... yeah, doing client apps is not "where it's at" compared to web apps. I never thought I would say that. Web apps were, once upon a time, sort of ugly and boring compared to all the cool stuff you could do with 'real' apps. But with things like Rails, and the ability to easily deploy new versions, the world has changed, and web apps are "where it's at", in a lot of ways.
If you're interested in using Tcl and Tk, I could send out a few feelers to that community. Lots of them aren't really in the YC 'demographic' (older, families, etc...), but some of them are pretty sharp coders.