At 00:27 22.10.2006, Juan Vuletich wrote:
>Hi Folks.
>
>The Weekly Juan #2 is out at www.jvuletich.org . Today I talk a bit about 
>my New Morphic project.
>
>Hope you like it. Any comment is welcome, especially discussion about the 
>ideas and the design.
>
>Thanks,
>Juan Vuletich


Hi Juan,
Yes, I do like it. Reducing the responsibilities of the base Morph class 
can only lead to a much simpler system. The danger is that the complexity 
will be reintroduced in the subclasses. As you say, it was the 
"enhancements" that made the current Morphic so intractable. Yet, the 
substance of every enhancement was needed by somebody at some time. Many of 
the enhancements are now widely used in many contexts.

I believe that the difficulties with Morphic were caused by the lack of a 
document clearly laying out how to do extensions and what to avoid. It 
could be in the form of an architecture document or possibly a pattern 
language. (A pattern language could be preferable because it is concise and 
extensible).

"The Morph hierarchy should not be a hierarchy of shapes." I take it you 
will be using delegation rather than subclassing for different shapes. This 
should take care of a great many problems with enhancements.

It will be very interesting to see how you intend to handle input. (I have 
spent many hours trying to understand why a certain morph got balloon help 
while another didn't, and I still don't know the answer)

I sometimes see an unfortunate trend to hide the "dirty details" of a new 
paradigm implementation (e.g., in a superclass or behind an unspecified 
interface). I hope you plan to avoid this trap. The beauty of Smalltalk is 
that everything is there to be studied and even modified by anybody. Hiding 
stuff behind a smoke screen perverts this principle. Do it right, do it 
simple, do it transparent. Then all kinds of wonderful edifices can be 
built on top of it.

This is too long already, so I just end with
My best wishes for you applaudable efforts
--Trygve


-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway