Pink Plane vs Blue Plane

Steven Swerling sps2000 at mail.com
Wed Feb 12 16:09:05 UTC 2003


diegogomezdeck at consultar.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Seeing the diferrent opinions (and the energy spent) in the thread "Re-
> doing Morphic" I realized of (at least) two differents points-of-view for
> the future of Squeak.
> 
> It's exactly what Alan call "Pink vs Blue Plane"
> 

To have a tension between the "Pink Plane" and the "Blue Plane" in 
Squeak, you would need a "Blue Plane" to begin with, and there isn't 
one. No, the tension is only on the Squeak list, where for years now 
people crop up requesting blue plane things (blue plane widgets, child 
windows and separate system windows, small deliverable images, too name 
some). These requests often turn the Pink Planers red, and so provoke a 
genuinely hostile (or more often, condescending) response. There have 
been some valiant attempts in the Blue plane during that time, but the 
general direction that Squeak has taken for the last few years has taken 
us further away from having a Blue Plane, to make it more like eToys, to 
have an image more and more addled with osteo-pink-plane-itus. Make 
Morphic *more* like eToys?! Oh how little that idea appeals. The Pink 
Plane is a plain old pain.

I have no interest in changing the world by inventing revolutionary new 
GUIs, or going on any other quixotic programming adventure. There are 
far better ways. I want to be able to take the little applets I wrote 
and share them with other photographers -- worldwide, there may be 10 
other photographers who would want them, ballpark figure. Or to share 
the little app for learning Turkish vocabulary -- 5 people max might use 
it. Not many more, I'm not talking about revolution here. I'm talking 
about sharing a few humble little tools with a few other people who 
don't happen to be programmers, or students learning how to program. And 
I want to give them the program in a vernacular that they understand, 
the one that has evolved over the last 25 years or so, the simple and 
flawed WIMP, because they don't want to use the GUI to change the world 
either. For personal reasons (politics), I would like it to use an open 
source language. And because I don't want to spend every bit of my free 
time programming, I'd like it to be in Smalltalk. Hence Squeak, which I 
use in spite all the Pink Plane insanity.

The squeak image is addled with the tedious Pink plane. Let's hope 
SqueakMap can help. Maybe the idea of a NewMorph tree will progress to 
rumors and realities, how sweet that would be. For those that make 
Squeak and Morphic *more* like eToys, a plaintive cry from my Plane to 
yours: please do so in a way that makes it possible to share the Squeak 
world with those that don't, you're making us very Blue.




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