Whither Squeak?

Craig Latta craig at netjam.org
Fri May 19 20:50:51 UTC 2006


Hi Ralph--

 > ...I have heard that people have tried to strip Morphic out of the
 > image, and they have tried to strip MVC out of the image, and both
 > have failed. Why did it fail?

	I think the initial attempts were hampered simply because it's 
difficult to remove the very GUIs you're using to do the removal.

	I have successfully removed both Morphic and MVC, as well as all 
support for graphics (BitBlt, the Form hierarchy, etc.), and the 
compiler, and almost everything else, largely automatically[1, 2]. I did 
this by operating on a target memory at a distance, from another memory 
where the tools were.

	Of course, the problem of how to delineate and arrange the various 
subsystems remains (whether those subsystems are optional or not). While 
Spoon offers a way to transfer behavior from one system to another as a 
side-effect of merely running it[3], we'll be better off if we create an 
intelligible organization. I think an approach that doesn't rely on 
source code in files to convey behavior, but instead uses direct 
message-based negotiation between running systems, will help a lot. I 
think it gives us a much better chance at success than we had before. 
You can do a lot of novel sneaky things when you can just inject classes 
and methods directly, with live assistance from the target's objects, 
rather than having to use the fileysystem and the compiler.

	I'm most of the way through a module system based on direct negotiation 
("Naiad", or "Name And Identity Are Distinct")[4].


-C

***

[1] http://netjam.org/spoon
[2]

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2006-April/000107.html

[3]

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-October/000061.html

[4]

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2006-April/000108.html

-- 
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]





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