Hi sean
I've been mulling this over for a while, and since we've been having
conversations about Spec's place in our future...
:)
Good. This is important that everybody express itself.
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.
I agree this is why I started to write some little tool to be able to
browse the system
when Spec is shaking.
Now when you see the code of the old browser this is not nice either.
So we will see and learn. But I can tell you that nothing is curved in
stone.
We will introduce GT but again you will get the same because GT is a
frameworks.
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.
We should iterate on it.
May be another framework will be better in the future
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.
