Sven, Sig, Well said.
Bill ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Sven Van Caekenberghe [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, November 04, 2011 11:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Simple vs. Easy Sure, Cuis is really cool as well as very impressive. However, it is limited: I want: Seaside Moose HTTP Client+Server Monticello Metacello XML JSON Glorp Database Access FFI UTF8 and other encodings … I want a practical Smalltalk that I can use to build useful applications, building on top of great frameworks. Pharo takes on all these and at the same time tries to simplify things, the hard way. Sven On 04 Nov 2011, at 14:35, Jimmie Houchin wrote: > Forward with permission from Juan Vuletich Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:42:03 -0300 > > Hi Folks, > > I'm answering you off-list because I'm not subscribed to the Pharo list. > Feel free to forward this there, if you wish. > > I think it is great to put focus on simplicity (an objective value) over > easyness (a subjective value). Rich also makes a good critic to usual > practices, including the dichotomy between understanding and TDD (test > driven development). > > However, the value of simplicity is not something new. The difference > between essential complexity and accidental complexity is the heart of > "No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" (by > Fred Brooks, 1986) and "There Is a Silver Bullet" (by Brad Cox, 1990, > http://drdobbs.com/184407534). It is also central to Smalltalk, see > "Design Principles Behind Smalltalk" (by Dan Ingalls, 1981, > http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps112/Spring03/readings/Ingalls81.html). > These three articles might be the most important writings on software > engineering ever. > > The problem with this discussion is that everybody will claim simplicity > is a crucial objective of their project. However, Pharo and Squeak don't > realize (or don't want to realize) that simplicity appears only by > removing complexity, never by adding more of it. > > Cuis is a Squeak fork with the #1 objective of being simple and > understandable. It is the result of more than 10 years suffering the > accidental complexity in Squeak, comparing with other Smalltalks, > together with a lot of reflection and work, by me and others. It is, I > believe, the only Smalltalk in active development that pursues this > objective of the original Smalltalk-80 project. You can get it from > http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html . Browse it a bit. Take > statistics (lines of code, etc). Compare. You might have a nice surprise. > > Jimmie, you asked "How can we move Pharo to be a better answer to Simple > vs. Easy?". My answer is: start anew. Rebase on top of Cuis. Give up > feature list as a priority, and focus on simplicity. Make a list of the > features in Pharo that are really important, and not part of Cuis, and > turn them into optional packages. Make that list as short as possible! > Worry more about code quality and less about discarding potentially > useful stuff, that is not good enough. > > Cheers, > Juan Vuletich > >
