Usability and look-and-feel (was Re: [squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean))

Ramon Leon ramon.leon at allresnet.com
Mon Jun 29 18:54:17 UTC 2009


> There are many superficial people in this crazy world. They don't get
> pass the current look-and-feel. It is unfortunate enough because they
> cannot see the true beauty behind Smalltalk. 

It is not superficial to look at Squeak and run away screaming as soon 
as you see it, in fact it's the exact reaction of the vast majority of 
developers who open up an image for the first time and it's quite a 
normal reaction.  It looks and feels like an ugly toy rather than a 
serious development environment and it's Squeak's fault, not the 
developers.

If it looks like a toy, then it shouldn't pretend to be otherwise.  If 
it's going to claim itself a serious platform that real work can be done 
on, then it needs to look and behave that way.  The Pharo guys 
understand this, but I don't think Squeak ever will.

Progress and backwards compatibility are fundamentally opposing forces, 
those insisting on backwards compatibility are the ones preventing 
progress.  Those insisting on the monolithic image of unmaintained 
packages are preventing progress.  The Pharo guys had the right idea, 
break from the community containing those people so those things can be 
dropped and some progress can actually made instead of the yearly 
endless "future of Squeak" posts that always seem lead to doing nothing.

My money's Goran's first scenario: Pharo continuing to steal developer 
mind share and Squeak slowly stagnating and dying off.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com



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