Hi Anton,
Thank you for your email, I appreciate the effort you put into it. I hope
you don't mind when I respond in a very frank way. Don't let my feedback
discourage you, if you don't like it feel free to file it under "an old
smalltalk dude's irrelevant opinion".
> Main benefits of this approach are:
> - you are not writing code
Here in our office in Ottawa, a common saying is "Just write the
code!" [1]. What we mean by this is that you are kidding yourself if you
think you can avoid writing "the code" by introducing one more layer of
abstraction, or going meta. In the end, to have the computer do what you
want it to do, "the code" has to be there in some form. So if you add
abstractions or indirections, these will be there in addition to "the
code". In many cases, just writing "the code", and not more, results in the
simplest solution. Easy to write, easy to understand, and easy to change.
> Main developer interaction is by dragging and dropping which can
> create links/wires (see http://neyric.github.com/wireit/ for
> reference). The screen real estate (the workspace) is managed by
> panning and similar approach as Code bubbles
> (http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm). Method and
> function parameters become slots where you can drop data.
These are interesting approaches. However, I am highly skeptical, because
from my experience, 2D wiring of components often results in configurations
that are hard to grasp visually even though they could be expressed
succinctly in textual form.
Rather than targeting the e4 project, have you thought about creating a new
project on http://eclipselabs.org or on GitHub? To "sell" your idea to the
existing e4 committers, it might be useful to be able to point to something
that is in a demoable state.
Good luck!
Boris
[1] I've first heard this from Steve Northover, but I am not sure if the
quote is his own.
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