[andrewflnr]

AI=~=GUIs=~=3D game engine? One of these is not like the others, and I'm not talking about the number of letters in the name. I take your point in general, but I don't buy the idea that designing a good GUI system is as hard as AI or distributed systems.

[api]

I dunno. Can you deal with right-to-left, left-to-right, and vertical languages with different glyph forms on the same screen while also coping with multiple accessibility settings, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, embeddable GL components, component reusability, efficient updates on state changes without a full re-render, and platform support for over 200 different graphics chipsets?

I'm just saying it's a problem domain that is consistently underestimated.

[murbard2]

It's not the same type of difficult; it's extremely painstaking and it's by no mean an easy task, but it's much less conceptually hard than a 3D engine, let alone an AI.