here is a plan!

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Fri Nov 3 21:05:37 UTC 2006


Juan Vuletich wrote on Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:00:21 -0300
> The "plan proposed by Klaus" seems to be what I'm doing, and you can
> download from www.jvuletich.org .

Exactly. My impression was that he seemed to think I was suggesting the
same thing, which I wasn't.

> I will not guarantee back compatibility. Anyway, I'm not redoing
> PluggableMorphs. And if I do it sometime, I guess that could be back
> compatible. After all, the old applications (browser, etc) work the same
> with PluggableViews in MVC as with PluggableMorphs. That suggests that
> compatibility with that programming model could be kept. Of course,
> other morphs most likely will not work.

I think quite a bit of the complexity in Morphic 2.0 is due to the need
to keep backwards compatibility with MVC. Of course, that allowed us to
keep using all the great Smalltalk tools we were used to and not having
this might have kept Morphic from ever becoming the main GUI in Squeak.

My last few emails might have given people new to the list the idea that
I want to keep Squeak as it is now. Even more veteran Squeakers might
have found it odd that I, Mr. "burn the diskpacks!" (for new people not
familiar with the term, see the part in Alan Kay's "Early History of
Smalltalk" where he wanted to start over after Smalltalk-76), was
defending the status quo. What I was actually trying to do is to have a
nice discussion about the costs involved. As long as we are aware of
what we are getting into (like Juan, above) I support whatever people
here want to do.

One thing that would be interesting if I had more time would be for me
to compare the various GUIs for Squeak as well as a few related to this.
Perhaps this will be possible next week. I saw two nice MVC links in the
del.ici.us section of Planet Smalltalk today:

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html
http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/mvc.html

And I would suggest that anyone interested in understanding what Morphic
is all about watch the ARK movie (the same guy who wrote the Alternate
Reality Kit in Smalltalk-80 was one of the creators of Self and then one
of the creators of Morphic 1.0):

http://www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8050

Another GUI that was developed for Squeak at Disney was PenSprites, but
all we have about that is a paper from OOPSLA 2003. John Maloney (the
other Morphic 1.0 creator, and the main Morphic 2.0 creator) has come up
with a different GUI for Squeak as part of his Scratch project. The
sources for that aren't available, so I can't compare it with Morphic.

-- Jecel



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