I've been mulling this over for a while, and since we've been having conversations about Spec's place in our future...
DISCLAIMER: this is a visceral experience I've been having over a long period of time, so it may not be factually "true" or current, but I present it as a contribution, if only by someone saying "you're full of crap because..." and we all learn something. The purpose of Spec as I understand it is to both come up with a nice streamlined UI API, and to make multiple targets (e.g. Morphic, html) possible with the same codebase. These are both important goals. And it seems we've made some progress at least in the first case. I definitely enjoy working with Spec's API far more that e.g. PolyMorph. Spec could be a very valuable application-level tool. If I want to write a business application, I can write once via a nice API and deploy "anywhere". Life is good. My discomfort is with making *all* our core tools Spec-based. While it is great from an "eating our own dog food perspective", one of the great principles of Morphic is exploration and discoverability. Many times before Spec I was able to poke around a tool, figure out how it worked, and apply that lesson to my own UI. However, with Spec I find it extremely difficult to figure out WTH is going on. Parsing of arrays of symbols seems to have replaced Smalltalk code, and each field/model piece of a Spec UI seems to be buried behind multiple ValueHolder/Adapter/whatever levels. Granted, now that we have e.g. specialized inspectors, we might be able to alleviate this. My 2c. ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/When-all-you-have-is-Spec-everything-looks-like-a-nail-tp4775537.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
