Re-doing Morphic ( what a beautiful stink bomb!)

Jack Johnson fragment at nas.com
Mon Feb 10 18:18:06 UTC 2003


Doug Clapp wrote:
> My hope is that today's high level code will be tomorrow's assembly
> language,
> and that something like Smalltalk will underlay a rich, helpful IDE, where
> "programmers" can state their intentions in general, not always "perfect
> syntax" ways

This concept always reminds me of the Star Trek programming paradigm, 
where you have random conglomerations of data, algorithms and processes 
and the system manages the tasks of actually getting the program to work.

As a newbie, I think Smalltalk's lack of typing is a step in this 
direction, but as the next step, when will we be able to take a generic 
stream or file object (fileIconMorph?), apply a URL or path to it (pop 
up file list?), and drop it on a SortMorph and have it either correctly 
sort the data numerically, textually, by date, by column for tab- or 
comma-delimited data, or by querrying the user?

If you think of the typical Unix script -- some awk or perl or (my 
favorite) a ball of grep and sed tied together by shoestring -- this 
kind of thing should be not only trivial in a shiny new Squeak 
environment for Part 2 of the new millennium, but also theorhetically 
implementable by a 2nd grader without coding, per se.

I think the foundation is already there in Squeak, and some of the 
projects definitely reflect that, but if it is a viable (and desired) 
goal, how do you get there from here?

I think *that's* a path worth exploring for the future.

-Jack



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list