Changing the subject line because it is worth the discussion.
On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 11:47:12PM -0500, Benoit St-Jean via Squeak-dev wrote:
On 2023-02-23 20:14, Stephen Travis Pope wrote:
Sounds like yet another reason to drop morphic, if you ask me, and go back to good-old MVC???
Nothing prevents us from replacing Morphic or redesigning it!
If Juan was able to do it for Cuis and Sam Shuster was able to design Pollock for VW, what's stopping us from even considering that option?
There is absolutely nothing preventing someone from developing a replacement for Morphic in Squeak. In fact, Squeak provides exactly the tools needed to support this. The key concept is that we can have different kinds of Project that can be defined and built up to support entirely new and different user interface models. Currently we think mainly of Morphic and MVC, but there is no reason at all that someone could not build something new and different.
From an engineering point of view, the key thing is that someone
can build an entirely new kind of "project" while keeping the existing MVC and Morphic worlds alive and healthy to support the new development effort.
About 10 years ago I went through the exercise of trying to bring a much earlier version Juan's Morphic3 into Squeak. http://www.squeaksource.com/SimpleMorphicSqueak/
This project was not successful, but since that time we have made great progress in cleaning up things like global variable dependencies in Morphic/MVC, and because of that I think that it would now be much easier to do this kind of work in today's Squeak.
If anyone has the interest and motivation to try building a new kind of Morphic, I would say just go ahead and do it. It will not be simple or easy but if you can build it up step by step, keeping the existing Morphic/MVC healthy to support your development work, then I see no reason that it cannot be done.
Dave