Removing Etoys, Morphic and other friends

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Oct 27 22:19:39 UTC 2006


Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> writes:
> Am 26.10.2006 um 14:48 schrieb Klaus D. Witzel:
> 
> > Concentrating on the remaining issue(s): why is it so important
> > that Morphic must be independent of Etoys, are they (have they)
> > subclasses etc of each other? Or are there political reasons for
> > having such an independence, or license reasons? Or what (perhaps
> > elegance, perhaps maintainability)?
> 
> Etoys support is in the Morphic base classes, and even in its design
> - Morphic really only was made to support Etoys. Now, if you want a
> lean clean Morphic that just supports "business widgets" you have to
> rip everything related to Etoys out. I think that's what Juan did -
> but since the base is missing you cannot go back.


What exactly counts as EToys?  It's an honest question.  Let's go
through some of the potential pieces.

The tile-based programming scripting system?  Sure.

The halo system, where every morph can have a halo pop up?  That
sounds like a generic Morphic thing to me.  Anyway, it's very useful,
and gives Squeak a lot of its flavor.

The named morphs business, where every morph can be given a name and
then searched using morphNamed: ?  I find this nice, especially when
hacking the system via inspectors.

Uniclasses?  I do not use them directly, but I do use "make own
subclass", so I hope that much continues to work.

SmartRefStream and ImageSegment's ?  I frequently upgrade to a new
Squeak image by snapshotting my old workspace and then loading it into
the new one.  I would hate to lose that.  There are also many other
uses of serialization.

Saving projects to the network or to disk?  I guess this is EToys, and
I guess it can be lived without for a suit-wearing programmer writing
shades-of-gray programs.  Nonetheless, it's pretty cool to have
available, although I grant it appears to be a little messy.

The paint tool for bitmap images?  Okay, it's not businessy, and EToys
requires it, but is it really a part of EToys?  I dunno.  I'd sure
hate to lose this tool though.

Flaps, as Goran mentioned?  Flaps are excellent!  I sure hope they do
not go away!



Hmm, I did not start with a point, but seem to have come to a couple.

1. There is no good definition of EToys.  Most of the above things
make sense on their own and have their own pros and cons.  We should
be more specific in this discussion instead of just saying "EToys".
Talking about "the EToys code" is a recipe for a silly discussion.


2. There are several components that could be logically carved out.
Many of the items in the above list should be removable IMHO.
Specifically, I see no reason not to have removable and reloadable
packages for: tile-based programming, the paint tool, and the stuff
for sharing projects on the network.


2b. Several of these seem very much part of Squeak and/or Morphic.
Serialization and uniclasses are core features of Squeak.  Flaps,
halos, and named morphs are core parts of Morphic.


3. I sure wish I had more time to play with Squeak.  :) It would be a
lot of fun to tidy up things in the above list and put them in
individual packages.


-Lex





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