Smalltalk Design Question

Ian Bicking bickiia at earlham.edu
Sun Feb 1 20:00:44 UTC 1998


Alejandro F. Reimondo writes:
> Provably the solution to do Not-What-I-Say is not to say it.  I
> think the problem is to have a languaje (the power of Smalltalk is
> not in the language, it is the environment and objects).  The
> problem of programming languages are extended to objects when we
> interact with them sending written messages.  On defined languages
> (like Pascal, C, etc) the problem is reduced reducing the language
> words.  But with objects, each object has potentially a language of
> communication.

> How to solve it?  Provably the better way is to programming with
> gestures. (see Mark Guzdial's mail on how to write a line).  Like
> touching objects and programming by example.

"The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the
computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's
as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our
facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at
objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys
give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have
lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects
that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old),
objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or
unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston)."
--The Anti-Mac Interface, http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm

This is talking about interface, not programming languages, but
programming is really just user interface when the user is more
experienced and more computationally ambitious, which is all the more
reason that we need to be as expressive as we can (though I think
non-progammer users deserve just as much expressiveness in their
communication as well).  *Sometimes* we can be most expressive using
pictures (blueprints are a good example, Morphic being a good computer
example).  This doesn't mean we want to give up language, which seems
to be the most powerful means of communicating with a computer (though
the "language" is hardly as complex or powerful as human language).

I'm curious how these two means of communication (language-based and
picture-based) could best fit together.  Pictures still clearly play
second-fiddle to words, which might be innevitable because computers
(unlike humans) are much less capable of understanding pictures, which
possibly relegates pictures to being the programmer's means of
communicating to the user, but not to the computer.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
|| Ian Bicking                 |  bickiia at earlham.edu ||
|| drawer #419 Earlham College |  (765) 973-2537      ||
|| Richmond, IN 47374          |                      ||
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list