So I created a deck with the intention that it would just contain the widgets and resources I needed to render the calculator skin, and then I'd just automate it with Lilt. But as I started messing around, I got a better idea of how Decker *wants* to be used.
I'm not sure what I expected; maybe something like Visual Basic, which is just a regular programming language except it has a graphical editor for some of its data structures. Turns out it's a lot closer to something like a spreadsheet: if you want to do a calculation, you plop down some input fields and an output field, and write some code to calculate the output field when the inputs change. It's not a template that gets instantiated when you compile and run, that's the data - if you change the value in an input field, it stays changed forever.
If your program has a bunch of data structures it needs to work with, that will persist from one invocation to another, instead of writing a bunch of constants in a header file, you plop fields on a card and type the data into them. As a result, writing a program *is* creating a GUI for it. Maybe not a polished GUI, maybe not the one you'd make if you could wave a magic wand, but it lets you describe, arrange and annotate things much more fluidly than traditional plain-text source.
