Alan Kay <[email protected]> writes: > One of the interesting misunderstandings was that Apple and then MS > didn't really understand the universal viewing mechanism (MVC) so they > thought views with borders around them were "windows" and view without > borders were part of "desktop publishing", but in fact all were the > same.
When we design an environment/framework, there are always tradeoffs to make when deciding what capabilities to include in the medium. A common problem is capabilities becoming obsolete and being worked around, for example many filesystems have provided metadata facilities over the years, but these have all hit limits which end up being worked around by storing metadata in files, making the FS unnecessarily complex. Another problem is restricting the technology which can be used by clients; for example browsers will only run Javascript, which made them 'toys' for many years in the eyes of C/C++/Java programmers. Unfortunately, a big factor is also the first-to-market pressure, otherwise known as 'Worse Is Better': you can reduce the effort required to implement a system by increasing the effort required to use it. The classic example is C vs LISP, but a common one these days is multithreading vs actors, coroutines, etc. In the case of an OS, providing a dumb box to draw on is much easier than a complete, complementary suite of MVC/Morphic/etc. components, even though developers are forced to implement their own incompatible integration layers, if they bother at all. This is why I'm not a fan of HTML5 canvas, since it's a dumb box which strips away the precious-little semantics the Web has, and restrict mashups to little more than putting existing boxes next to each other. Cheers, Chris PS: I spent one summer living in Etoys on my OLPC XO-1, creating physics simulations. It's a very nice system once it's gotten used to. It's one thing to drag and drop tiles to make a scribbled picture start spinning, it's quite another to make the tiles themselves start spinning :) PPS: I keep meaning to pull those those simulations off my XO and upload them to squeakland. Unfortunately I reached a point where they maxed out the RAM so I couldn't finish them :( _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
