Okay. Now I get it.

To quote myself from earlier:

"Re: eToys was hacked into Morphic. That's the reason things keep breaking.

In the PC world I've sometimes seen system implementations that are "just enough" to run another technology on top of it. It sounds like this is what happened with Morphic--just enough was implemented to run eToys. I wonder what the expectation was? Was this done by design, and the assumption was that if there were improvements to be made, that the UI would just grow organically out of what was already there? Maybe the original developers didn't have a full implementation of Morphic in mind, but rather just wanted to get the development process started, and hoped that others would just build on top of it. Like I said, I'm just learning about it at this point, so I don't know the internals as well as others on here. Again, I wonder if the reason why stuff keeps breaking, is that the developers who are working with it are trying to impose a model on it that is incompatible with the way it was developed earlier. Maybe whoever did it had other intentions in mind and the current crop of developers are not seeing it.

I'm finding it difficult to believe that with the design of Smalltalk being so elegant that something like this would be done sloppily. I guess I'm wondering about the history of how this developed."

I found this from Alan Kay on April 22 in this list:

"Etoys was a demo and a prototype. It is a real tribute to Squeak (and the team) that it was actually shippable around the world. But it is not a production system, and it is not scalable to the hundred dollar laptop as it stands. It needs to be reimplemented, and many parts have to be improved. We have been doing some of this (and the results are interesting) but we have to take every avenue to get a scalable version that can be taken care of by more production like people."

This explains a lot. It sounds like from what he's saying that work was under way then to rework eToys. What I'm unclear on is to what end, since I grabbed this out of the discussion that was going on about the possibility of porting eToys to Python. Anyway, this answered my questions about eToys.

For the edification of others, the post I got this quote from is here: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-April/102912.htm...

---Mark