I've been checking out Etoile for a while, and today I took some more
time to read a lot of the docs. I thought I'd share some of my initial
reactions and some random thoughts and questions.
I think the Etoile web page definitely communicates that this is
something else than your average GNUstep project. The combination of
some pretty graphics with those fragments of Objective-C code caught
my eye. That said, I've later come to feel that the front page (and
most of the site) is too heavy on prettiness and too light on actual
information. Although I sensed that something interesting was going on
here, I was not sure whether et was more than an attempt to give gs a
decent look and feel, combined with a couple of people working on some
pet projects without any real cohesion.
It wasn't until I read the faq (today) that I really started to get a
more concrete picture of what et is trying to accomplish. In my
opinion the info in the faq could be expanded into several pages and
could easily be made into a "tour of Etoile". It is definitely the
single most informative document I've seen so far (and it's not really
so much of a faq as it is a description of the system. At this point,
these features stand out for me as defining et.
* A hot runtime
* Non-file based object metaphor
* Zooming interface
* Dynamic language support
* Updated gs theming
Secondly, I read (half-skimmed) David's papers on the runtime and got
doubly inspired. Prior to reading those I wasn't really sure what the
Language Kit was all about. Just a hook for various "scripting"
languages? But now, between the faq and the papers, I'm really
starting to get a feeling of et as coherent system. Again, I think
some of the info in the papers should/could be made much more visible
on the web page.
A question: how much of the runtime described in the papers is
actually implemented at this time in et?
I also wonder how much of these ideas are fed into gs and how much is
et specific.
It seems to me that the web page should be 90% geared towards
developers for the time being. Even if someone else came across the
page and liked it, they wouldn't really be able to get very far in
trying to use et, so it seems a waste of resources to go out of your
way to attract them. Not in the long term, of course, but for now.
Attracting active developers is, I suppose, much more important. I
myself would have been (even) more easily hooked if the front page had
a list of features ("flexible, dynamic runtime with support for...",
"updated ui metaphor...", "zooming interface...", "documents not
files..."), with a link for a fuller explanation of each item. Maybe
I'm stating the obvious, and probably your answer is "yes it's on our
todo list", but I think you already have a lot of information and
examples available, and you just have to put them up front.
About the proposed themes: these obviously constitute a pretty big
step in the world of GNUstep themes, but -- I'm sorry -- for the
average non-geek, they are not really close to a cutting-edge, 21st
century feeling. Well, maybe close but... I should add that I don't
think any open source desktop really is. I know many developers simply
scoff at such obsession with cosmetic detail but users don't. And
personally I'm as much a user as a developer and I care a lot about
how my work environment feels. I'm sure you would agree that this has
nothing to do with bloated, candy filled interfaces, but with the
small details that make users feel that the gui inspires them, as
opposed to merely letting them get something done. And again on a
completely personal note, all that purple doesn't really do it for me.
I think etoile is definitely on the right track, but it would be worth
to keep on polishing the proposed themes and getting some external
feedback on them.
Btw: it seemed like you're saying (I read through a couple of
interviews too) that Apple's horizontal menu bar was a downgrade from
OpenStep's vertical one, and yet it seems like you're going for a
horizontal bar yourselves. Am I wrong?
Language Kit: from some of the examples and discussions, I first got
the feeling that it was just about putting some Smalltalk syntax and
block semantics on top of the gs runtime and libraries. There seemed
to be a focus on compile time tricks, that to me looked kind of
contrary to the spirit of Smalltalk. As I said, after reading the two
papers I got a completely different appreciation of the et runtime,
but I'm still pretty unclear about how Language Kit will work for
languages whose libraries are not easily mapped onto gs classes. What
will the benefits be in that case? Why not just create a llvm front
end?
Also, I was wondering if it would be of interest to implement fancier
parsing as part of Language Kit. Maybe parser combinators? Or parsing
expression grammars? Would that seem like something that belongs in
Etoile?
Well I have and will have a lot more questions. I'm really looking
forward to seeing how Etoile develops.
/F
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