>>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.
>
> yes.
And of course, the stuff in the Documentation/Developer/ dir is great
if it could be prettied up a bit. I should add that I would be happy
to help with this kind of stuff once I've gotten more experience with
Etoile, since I think it's a great way to learn and an easy way to do
something useful.

> I think we all are very interested in good GUI design and a good UI
> theme. Quite a lot of effort/discussion went in the Nesedah theme for
> example, but as all design, it's a result of a set of constraints..

Ah, yes. I had mostly been looking at the Narcissus samples. Could
only find one Nesedah sample. Are there more?

> For me the main interest of LK is the Smalltalk implementation,
> because as david would say, I'm a Smalltalk fanboy :)

It seems like many/most people who might be attracted to Etoile would
be of a Smalltalk mindset. Maybe it would be good to mention the
Smalltalkish characteristics of Etoile on the front page?

>Well, for me DSL depends principally on the underlying language's
>expressivity, and Smalltalk (and to a certain extent Objective-C) are
>great languages from that aspect...

One can distinguish between embedded and "external" DSL:s and both
have pros and cons. Embedded DSL:s are very popular in the Ruby
community, where people churn them out by the dozen. I'm not sure
that's always useful. I was not only thinking of the *possibility* of
using DSL:s in Etoile, but of making it an active part of the system
architecture. A lot of configuration and code that is concerned with a
clearly delimited domain (like sockets or UI, especially if enriched
with constraints) can be made much more expressive with a DSL. This
translates into easier user configurability and maintenance, and
greater usability of API:s etc.

The thing with embedded DSL:s a la Ruby is that they are great when
you don't care much about what's going on and just want to get some
tasks done fast, but as soon as you want to go beyond that it can be
unreasonably hard to understand what's going on. So I think it would
be great to have a common front-end like OMeta (perhaps in conjunction
with a simplified runtime API, although it's already simply). Once
you've learned that, it will be relatively easy to look at a DSL spec
to understand how it works and extend or modify it. I'm trying to read
up on OMeta now and might give it a shot.

/F

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