On Feb 1, 2012, at 11:27 PM, Lawson English wrote:
> Does Pharo use Morphic? Is there a conscious decision on people's parts to
> NOT try and keep the various flavors of Morphic compatible, or is it just
> "too hard," or that people don't care, or think it irrelevant?
>
So there are multiple problems:
1) Morphic is not and API or a codebase but and idea (or principle)
And the question is even: a good one? In the current state for sure not. For
sure it's instantiation depends *a lot* on the language
model you have.
2) Hard problems get harder if you add players.
It is already nearly impossible to change Pharo alone. Add Squeak (with the
stated goal to never ever remove etoys..), that pair to keep compatible
is already impossible. Add another *language* and we are speaking about
something that is just not possible
3) compatibility across languages means using only the comman denominator.
Feature wise. Graphics subsystem, alone that.
But then language. Imagine we add the Slots to Pharo. Then morphic gets much
simpler: no morph
extension, all bit values will be bit slots (compact), properties will be
dictonary slots.
So now: Squeak will not have that. Self will not have that. So does that mean
we can never use new abstraction for our base frameworks?
How things are done in Self vs. Javascript is completely different. You can not
at all share a framwork in any meaningful sense across these
languages. And then add Smalltalk. (Ah, and as we are on it, VA, VW, STX, GNU
Smalltalk of course, too!).
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de
