[squeak-dev] Pink plane vs blue plane (was Re: Proposal: Project Pink Book)

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Wed Apr 21 10:30:51 UTC 2010


On 21.04.2010, at 10:29, Michael Haupt wrote:
> 
> First of all, please fill me in about the "pink plane" idiom. I don't
> understand that. :-)

It's an Alanism. Look at VPRI's logo :)

Dan Ingalls applied the planes idea to Squeak:

=======================
There are two strong, often opposed forces at work in the Squeak team. But, we have managed to keep it together long enough that it's probably adequate to articulate the two and you can guess at where equilibrium will take us. These were most recently articulated in Alan's allusion to Koestler's metaphor of progress in two orthogonal planes: a horizontal pink plane of incremental improvement, and a vertical blue plane of paradigm shift. The colors are Alan's.

Pink plane forces involve making an ever-better Smalltalk-80 system that can serve a wide range of research and academic needs, while leveraging off the large body of ST-80 documentation, existing code archives, and synergy with high-performance commercial ST-80 systems. In this plane, Squeak's high level of compatibility with the ST-80 language (and even with the MVCdisplay architecture) is a plus, and current progress forces are aimed at a higher performing interpreter, with support for block closures, exception handling, as well as some answer to various needs for finalization. [...]

Blue plane forces involve a very different graphics model, evolution of the language model, and hopefully an even simpler, yet more powerful language kernel. Each of these constitutes significant change, and is thus at odds with various entrenched interests. At the same time, each offers significant benefits.
=======================

Read the full thing: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/158

To Alan himself, the two planes are way more profound:
http://www.memestreams.net/users/akira/blogid4041444/

- Bert -





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list