Henrik Gedenryd wrote:

> There is also a third possibility, which might be called the "blue" option,
> being truly different and radically rethought, instead of an attempt to make
> "fix it" improvements to the present solution. Perhaps this approach is
> suggested to you by someone who took his thesis' name from a play by George
> Bernard Shaw, or another guy who wrote the first modeless text editor, who
> knows?
> 
> This solution no longer has any listing command, because it is redundant. In
> fact there is no syntax at all, hence no syntax errors, nor a need to choose
> between English or Latin. And no command line, no text editing. It is
> entirely non-linguistic. And still, it proves to be exceptionally
> "reasonable" to ordinary users; it is "familiar" in a much deeper sense,
> which is immediately gistable, requiring minimal or no training, is even
> considered "fun". In fact, the solution proves so successful that in the
> future hardly anyone would even consider the two other options for dealing
> with files.
> 
> (By coincidence <?> these guys twenty years later run Stagecast Software
> together.) <Historical note: there are plenty of others who should be
> credited as well. Particularly those behind the project in that other
> company.>
> 
> In the next ten years,the underlying principles behind this solution become
> embedded in the concept of Direct Manipulation: immediacy, directness,
> concreteness; small, incremental, reversible physical operations with
> immediate feedback, and so on. Everything has a concrete representation
> without any need for issuing commands to call it forth. Operational closure,
> meaning that the results of one operation are also the "input" for the next
> operation. Etc.
> 
> And ten years from that, these priniciples will have been all but eradicated
> by new generations of programmers who replicate their surface appearances
> but who show no interest in the underlying principles.
> 
> Henrik
Is this the continuation of apple cocoa at www.stagecast.com ? 
I played around with the apple cocoa a few years back and it showed lots of
potentional. I never got my feet really wet though and since the work
was 
discontinued by apple and stagecast took over I have not looked at it.

The times I have played with the tile script system in squeak
I have run into problems / logic I don't understand and that probably is
to hard tying to the underlying program logic. That way the tiles become
a slow and hard way to write some stuff I can do in the browser. 
What I would like is that the logic of the gui programming is 
abstracted away from the underlying system. The less I know about what's
underneath the gui the better. I don't want to know how the tool was
made to be able to use it. Like Henrik said, the horror of filesystems
and 
alike should not be visible to the user. I think of it like the
step up from writing machine code to Smalltalk. It has to be equally 
big step up. 
I think we have at hand some of the most powerfull and well designed tools
to make that step; Smalltalk and Morphic. And I think it's on the 
way to become really great. It's like the last ropes that hold the
ballon tied down should be cut so we could fly :-)

Karl