Oh, come on, you are getting hypersensitive here. I don't want to bicker but I have seen these types of justifications many times, where the claim is always that the uglier design is somehow more functional. I don't mean to offend anyone, I just don't buy that type of rationalisation...
I agree with this. As someone who has worked in UI design for decades, there are some simple rationales to follow, and Wulf's design is definitely a good one.
If you wish to have criticism be constructive... then you need to think as much about your tone as you do about the content. I also agree that there is no reason not to have a more elegant layout involved and that the current design could be improved - but considering that the RAD environment used to produce the application was designed originally for the Atari ST (I actually didn't even know it had been made opensource and continued as a project) - there are undoubtedly some pretty ridiculous limitation as far as object layouts - i.e. it's not as elegant as a more modern IDE & language would provide.
However, there's absolutely no reason why someone couldn't start a project to produce a similar application using whatever design they chose... but IE has already stated that his application will be closed-source... so working on a separate project would probably be more fruitful than simply going around in circles trying to convince IE to do something different.
Huh?
I just read what you wrote: " RAD environment used to produce the application was designed originally for the Atari ST"Wrong Euphoria
....I am using my own custom flavor developed over the years: http://rapideuphoria.com/
My environment is flexible enough to do pretty much anything I want. However, to use Wulf's design I would literally have to start over to have the core design fit his design. But I will be making changes once everything is working well...
