[squeak-dev] Re: Regarding Polymorph

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Sat Mar 13 09:21:02 UTC 2010


On 3/13/2010 1:08 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> It was just an example, of how far you should go, to be at least as
> rich in features as Morphic.
> It is much bigger investment than modifying existing code. And still
> you have big chances that
> it won't replace Morphic as a framework of choice for developers.
> So, it is much more risk, comparing to the risk of changing Morphic
> even if it breaks some 'cool' years old stuff.

Unless you do it differently. There is no reason why a well-designed 
framework cannot happily coexist with Morphic. In which case you can 
build your framework pretty much without touching anything. Tweak had 
some of that; you could run Tweak projects inside Morphic but as with so 
many things it wasn't quite completed.

>>> but i think this is what any brand new framework have to meet: compete
>>> with Morphic and die :)
>>
>> You think so? Hm ... well maybe I should finally put a little release
>> together. I think a decent Morphic competition is best done by being
>> antithetical to Morphic. I'll see if I can find some time to polish things
>> up a bit.
>>
> Not sure i understood what is 'being antithetical to Morphic' means.

It means being abstract instead of concrete. Morphic is a very conrete 
environment; but if you look at a UI more abstractly, it's just 
rectangles with behaviors. Skinning ultimately does that - it demotecs 
the lively morphs to being rectangles with their looks being supplied 
from elsewhere. If you take that to its logical end you'll find yourself 
in a world that is made up of abstract widgets that don't even have a 
particular "binding" to a graphics interface. All they know is how to 
act in response to events. Pretty much all of the concreteness of 
Morphic is gone even though you could reintroduce that. But you start 
from a base that's very abstract and that's what I mean by being 
antithetical to Morphic.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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