> I haven't really gotten to the point where I'd say Squeak, > MVC or Morphic is
> a lot of fun. I think it could be fun, and that's why I'm > sticking with it.
> I may yet also end up learning Tk (tkinter) because at least > I could get
> some trivial apps to run on both Windows and Mac.

Perhaps Tk/Tkinter has come a long way in the past two years, but it was highly unstable (at least on the Macintosh), and looked quite different on Windows and Mac.  The primary difficulty, of course, is the almost incoherent manner in which Tk's requirement of a topView visible window is reconciled with the Macintosh notion of a Menu Bar.

I was just pushing over the limits of that hurdle when I first discovered Squeak.  I completed a multi-media cross-platform application I was hacking over Python/Tkinter in Smalltalk just a few weeks after loading Squeak.  I don't think I'd ever consider using Tk again outside the context of a script.

> Beyond that, the parallels between Squeak/MVC/Morphic and > Tcl/Tk are many:
> > 1. ugly but have fans who are vociferous in their support, > probably because
> both are tightly bound to a particular language and style of > programming.
> 2. both lack any kind of easy to use gui-builder > functionality, which makes
> it hard for anyone new to adopt them
> 3. both lack most of the more modern widget types
> 4. both seem to have adopted the native-look-and-feel of an > X-Terminal from
> the early 1980s, and neither one has been updated to be > capable of 'native
> look and feel' on Mac and Windows.

I respectfully dissent with many of these remarks.  All I can say is that Mr. Postma should probably spend some more time with each, and then reconsider his views in view of what he has learned.  

As to ease of adoption, I think spending more time actually trying to adopt, or meaningfully comparing productivity with a specific competitive "with-GUI" system would be beneficial.  If you determine it isn't worth the time now, by all means come back in six to twelve months or so and see what we have then.  As to the sources of the ST-80 "look and feel," I suggest rereading some computing history.

On the other hand, if a GUI-Builder is what Mr. Postma needs, I remind all that this is an open-source project, and we are all free to provide one.