----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" 
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2010 9:21 AM
Subject: [squeak-dev] Re: Regarding Polymorph


> 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.
>

Yes, that'd be the way I'd go if I had the time/support to do the vast 
amount of work required.
Perhaps the other option... turn it all on its head and have the nice new 
framework with adapters to run Morphic within.
That'd solve the backwards compatability issues while alowing new progress 
to be made.

> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>