Usability and look-and-feel (was Re: [squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean))

Ian Trudel ian.trudel at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 19:39:49 UTC 2009


2009/6/29 Stéphane Rollandin <lecteur at zogotounga.net>:
> At this point I'm just puzzled. Why would people so deeply in love with the
> edit-compile-cycle they find it hard to live without it even consider
> Smalltalk (or Lisp, for that matter) in the first place ? I'm lost. Maybe
> you should start by selecting a bit more carefully the people you want to
> Squeak-e-vangelize (half-kidding here, no offense intended).

No offence taken. The problem is different. People don't like changes,
people are scared of changes. And going from edit-compile-cycle to
such a different approach, as in Squeak, it's a monstrously big drop.

Please, make no misunderstanding on my intention, it's not about
entirely remodelling Squeak to fit another paradigm. My primary idea
is to make the transition easier with some familiar elements and a
better organization. The rest can be pretty much as we do... let's
just not scare people off at first sight.

> Or, at the contrary: let them experience a big shock that wipes out their
> preconceived ideas about programming. Trying to help them avoid that shock
> may actually make thing more difficult for them in the long term. They have
> to grok that Smalltalk *is* different.

30 years of big shock have proved not to work.
Thank you for trying, come back in your next life.
We cannot perpetuate recipes, which does not work.

2009/6/29 Ramon Leon <ramon.leon at allresnet.com>:
> It is not superficial to look at Squeak and run away screaming as soon as
> you see it, in fact it's the exact reaction of the vast majority of
> developers who open up an image for the first time and it's quite a normal
> reaction.  It looks and feels like an ugly toy rather than a serious
> development environment and it's Squeak's fault, not the developers.

Exactly my point. Squeak's fault. Our fault as a community. The sooner
we understand it, the sooner we can improve the situation.

> If it looks like a toy, then it shouldn't pretend to be otherwise.  If it's
> going to claim itself a serious platform that real work can be done on, then
> it needs to look and behave that way.  The Pharo guys understand this, but I
> don't think Squeak ever will.

Amen. The first sentence alone summarize well the idea.

> Progress and backwards compatibility are fundamentally opposing forces,
> those insisting on backwards compatibility are the ones preventing progress.
>  Those insisting on the monolithic image of unmaintained packages are
> preventing progress.  The Pharo guys had the right idea, break from the
> community containing those people so those things can be dropped and some
> progress can actually made instead of the yearly endless "future of Squeak"
> posts that always seem lead to doing nothing.

The most pressing problem about backward compatibility resides in the
fact that the community does not seem to understand with exactitude
what the backward compatibility needs are. The years have passed and
proposed change are tossed away because it might break compatibility.
It becomes an easy excuse.

Paradoxically, many changes have been brought to Squeak over the years
without much deep-thinking, resulting in a mess and making the
compatibility issue even greater. Are we really supposed to forever
support faulty code and defective designs?

The Squeak community wants backward compatibility, so it be. However,
it has to be defined in a comprehensive and accurate manner, and no
less. I don't want to be served meaningless excuses. Backward
compatibility becomes meaningless when it is used broadly and at any
moment on a system that never had a defined API, except, perhaps,
Smalltalk-80 as a standard.

As Stéphane said, it's important to find the balance in opposing
forces. We cannot entirely ditch the backward compatibility in favour
of progress and, yet, we cannot entirely stick to backward
compatibility because it will hinder progress.

> My money's Goran's first scenario: Pharo continuing to steal developer mind
> share and Squeak slowly stagnating and dying off.

Don't be blasphemous. :)

> Ramon Leon
> http://onsmalltalk.com
>
>

Best regards,
Ian.

-- 
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/



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