Quoth Duane:

>I hope that people won't take the following comments too personally.

Actually I thought they were hilarious.


> Consider that perhaps some of those "modern" GUI concepts are 20 
> years old and that it just _may_ be possible that one can build 
> better, different GUIs, and that something like Morphic can be coaxed 
> into providing some of the elements in that direction.  

So I should build my GUI around Morphic's piano-keyboard morph or a rotating
smily face I can draw with the paint tool?  Nice demos and educational
stuff, but Morphic is hardly useful for any real work.

And let's look at MVC for a moment. It has two (count em, 2) widgets: 

Rectangles, and Text.  

Some of the rectangles do things [scrollbars] but they are still just
rectangles.  Heck, even my Commodore 64 had a better GUI in 1985.
	
If you're proud of Squeak's usefulness for "serious development", I'd just
like to know what sort of serious development you mean.

		:-P


> Consider also that there are several serious, professional developers 
> doing world-class work using Squeak, just not very openly, and not 
> precisely in the way you'd expect.

What do you consider World Class professional work?  I can see using Squeak
for teaching smalltalk, and for research, and Alice sure is neato, but what
serious [paid?] professionals are you talking about? 

Are there *ANY* commercially useful applications written in Squeak?

Are there *ANY* applications written in Squeak that are used by
non-programmers?

Take 95% of the software in use today, and ask yourself if you could do that
in Squeak, and if so, why are none of the "parts" those applications require
built into Squeak?  Squeak is not a consummate developers tool, it's an
interestingly portable research platform, with less seriously useful
features than Smalltalk/V had in the early 1990s.

>business computing vision of 1985 

And Squeak looks like a direct descendant of the ST-80. So maybe Squeak
needs about 20 years of updating, do you think?

Warren