Brad, I never like to see a Smalltalk project being rewritten in X to improve this or that, _especially_ its stability. Knowing nothing other than having looked at Sophie a while back and the little bit I read courtesy of a quick search on Sophie and Java, some guesses:
First, I suspect the strange look did not help. Sophie had a very pre-Pinesoft, post-Croquet "enhanced" look IIRC - not what one wants to show to marketing types. I can picture that meeting; good thing I'm busy that year. Add to that the Squeak community's general aversion for modal dialogs (even dialogs in general) that keep users out of trouble, and things would not go well. Don't believe me about modes? Consider my boss - a great guy, inventive, brilliant (no, I'm not just sucking up<g>, besides, he'll never read this) and able to turn a poorly protected piece of software into mush. Let him start the machine working on multiple conflicting/racing tasks at your peril, ok. Modes can be good; properly designed, they guide the user vs. being a gratuitous constraint. Second, and perhaps more tenuous, I wonder about the design of Squeak's streams. They did say they wanted to improve stability. Personally, my money is on the (absense of) user interface convention mixed with real users leading to a mess, but Squeak's default actions can obscure the real cause of an error. Instead of understanding that too much was read at a well-defined place (while it is happening), one gets a subsequent bounds violation or other other problem, very likely "long" after the I/O is done. It's asking for trouble IMHO. Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brad Fuller Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 3:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Graphical Objects On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Stéphane Ducasse<[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jul 14, 2009, at 9:50 PM, Brad Fuller wrote: > >> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Stéphane >> Ducasse<[email protected]> wrote: >>> Hi brad >>> No :) >>> We removed it ;) because it was a mess but I would like to have have >>> a better one. >>> We could imagine morph to use a creation method with a pragma and >>> that a tool would query that pragma and we could get the morph. >> >> I agree that it was messy, from my inexperienced skillset. I would >> love to have a way to create projects or books and populate with >> graphics and multimedia for presentations. Pharo looks so nice and it >> seems to run quickly (could be my mind though) that it would be great >> to use. > > we will remove BookMorph because it is a giant huge terrible mess. > Now if you want multimedia publishing or creation have you look at > openSophie? I have looked at Sophie in a limited way.. First, it's Java now (hmmmm..) But, kidding aside, I didn't particularity like the way Sophie confined the space for objects. My perception might clearly be a result of my limited use of (Squeak) Sophie, perhaps John can steer me in the right direction. I also believe (Java) Sophie is just in alpha and Squeak Sophie is not maintained. I just liked the way I could create presentations in Squeak - it seemed open and I could create any new objects or tweak the old by adjusting code. -- Brad Fuller +1 (408) 335-0112 _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
