Hi Bert,

>> I've been reading all I could find about Tweak and found out that the key
>> idea is to get more eToys-like functionality inside the language.
>
> That is largely correct, although I'd say "environment" rather than
> "language" - one system to support everyone from the child to the
> programming guru. Etoys explored one extreme of the spectrum, it was a
> very restricted environment, aimed only at children, whereas Tweak is
> meant to support a wide range of users.

I see.

>>  Sort of abandoning Smalltalk.
>
> Well, Smalltalk was always meant to be the tool to build its own
> successor. That's what happened at XEROX PARC in a roughly 2-year cycle.
> This development stagnated pretty much after Smalltalk-80 (with some
> exceptions like Self etc).

I know the history, and I agree. But Smalltalk turned out to be the best
tool for pro developers. And I like it. And I'm more focused on
application developing than tools research. Smalltalk is mature and that's
good for people like me.

>>  I prefer Smalltalk / Morphic. Why? I'm a developer, not an end
>> user. So, I want tools meant for developers. I don't think the same tools
>> are the best for everybody.
>
> Not necessarily the same tools, but the same environment. That's why
> Smalltalk is powerful (nice argument here
> http://www.darrenhobbs.com/archives/000620.html)

I understand. My argument was wrong.

>>  I just find the originial ideas behind Smalltalk and
>> Morphic to be 'right'.
>
> What "original idea behind Smalltalk" do you have in mind, specifically?
> As far as I know, Smalltalk, and everything Alan Kay pursued since, is
> specifically aimed at end-users. To illustrate this in context of Squeak,
> I'll attach an old email of Alan's, sent to this list 6 years ago:
>
> (Wonderful and inspiring words from Alan snipped...)

I'll try to restate my thoughts. I've been using and loving Squeak since
1997.
I was amazed and enlighted by Morphic. Having used commercial Smalltalks,
until I saw Morphic, my best hopes for GUI bulding was MVC. May be you
remember my enthusiasm about Morphic in
http://webs.uolsinectis.com.ar/jmvuletich/MorphicTutorial/Morphic.html
(not really a tutorial, just an essay).

In http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeakdoc/11 , from one of the first docs
available on eToys I read:

// This User-Scripting regime is still in its infancy, as is the
// documentation about how to use it. We put it out at this time only
// in hope that some users will find something of interest in spite of the
// rough state of the design and the code (and in spite of the numerous
// temporary perturbations it has caused to an otherwise elegant Morphic
// graphics system.)

I particulary like class hierarchies. I prefer Smalltalk over Self or eToys
for this reason.

I never felt comfortable with these perturbations, and after seeing nobody
else felt like me, I decided to "tweak" squeak to better fit my needs.

Maybe Tweak will be the answer to all my needs. But the Tweak shorter
term  goals don't seem to be the same as mine. I need something simpler
than Morphic, where every Morph defines the coordinate system for its
drawing and submorph locating. I currently don't need any layout policies,
and I probably won't even need Morph resizing. But I do want zooming
and rotating as operations done with the coordinate systems. This would
give me screen resolution independence, and better quality zooming.
This is a NewMorph class that can live in the same world as current Morphs.
It's much easier for me to explore this kind of things in a Morphic without
eToys environment than in regular Morphic or Tweak.

There is something else about Tweak. Tweak (as far as I know) was never
presented as the next GUI for Squeak or the next Squeak. It was presented
as a sort of fork, declaring interest in not getting too far from the Squeak
community but without this as a priority. And the lack of documentation
made difficult to envision where Tweak was headed. I believe it's still hard
to guess that.

I believe a smaller and cleaner Morphic system will be both useful and nice.
I offer what I did to to the community. If it's not valuable for anybody,
that's ok too.

I hope to have been clear enough, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's
feelings.

Cheers,
Juan