Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
There is also a third possibility, which might be called the "blue" option, being truly different and radically rethought, instead of an attempt to make "fix it" improvements to the present solution. Perhaps this approach is suggested to you by someone who took his thesis' name from a play by George Bernard Shaw, or another guy who wrote the first modeless text editor, who knows?
This solution no longer has any listing command, because it is redundant. In fact there is no syntax at all, hence no syntax errors, nor a need to choose between English or Latin. And no command line, no text editing. It is entirely non-linguistic. And still, it proves to be exceptionally "reasonable" to ordinary users; it is "familiar" in a much deeper sense, which is immediately gistable, requiring minimal or no training, is even considered "fun". In fact, the solution proves so successful that in the future hardly anyone would even consider the two other options for dealing with files.
(By coincidence <?> these guys twenty years later run Stagecast Software together.) <Historical note: there are plenty of others who should be credited as well. Particularly those behind the project in that other company.>
In the next ten years,the underlying principles behind this solution become embedded in the concept of Direct Manipulation: immediacy, directness, concreteness; small, incremental, reversible physical operations with immediate feedback, and so on. Everything has a concrete representation without any need for issuing commands to call it forth. Operational closure, meaning that the results of one operation are also the "input" for the next operation. Etc.
And ten years from that, these priniciples will have been all but eradicated by new generations of programmers who replicate their surface appearances but who show no interest in the underlying principles.
Henrik
Is this the continuation of apple cocoa at www.stagecast.com ? I played around with the apple cocoa a few years back and it showed lots of potentional. I never got my feet really wet though and since the work was discontinued by apple and stagecast took over I have not looked at it.
The times I have played with the tile script system in squeak I have run into problems / logic I don't understand and that probably is to hard tying to the underlying program logic. That way the tiles become a slow and hard way to write some stuff I can do in the browser. What I would like is that the logic of the gui programming is abstracted away from the underlying system. The less I know about what's underneath the gui the better. I don't want to know how the tool was made to be able to use it. Like Henrik said, the horror of filesystems and alike should not be visible to the user. I think of it like the step up from writing machine code to Smalltalk. It has to be equally big step up. I think we have at hand some of the most powerfull and well designed tools to make that step; Smalltalk and Morphic. And I think it's on the way to become really great. It's like the last ropes that hold the ballon tied down should be cut so we could fly :-)
Karl
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org