2012/11/25 Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]>: > May be you did not see it but adding polymorph was the first things we did > even if the code was not perfect.
No no, I realized the addition of Polymorph. Although it is only now that I am starting to get active in open-source Smalltalk, I have been following it since the days of Squeak 3.X (maybe earlier - I heard about Smalltalk for the first time in 1998). I lived through the announcement of Pharo (without understanding, at that time, why all the fuzz). In my head I kept coming and going to/from Smalltalk, never being able to give it up ;-) No matter how hard I tried, or how disappointed I sometimes was, I was also hooked. I knew somewhere that there is something true and unique to it. My heart was/is somehow tied to Smalltalk, I guess, even if I'm painfully aware of many of its (current) shortcomings... But I digress... Yes, I noticed about Polymorph. > I often said to my students if you want to faint or vomit when you open > Squeak (at that time I was maintaining squeak3.8or9) then this is normal > we are working on it and one day it will be cool. Hahaha! Well, it definitely looks ahem... different... than anything out there. But Squeak also took notice and somehow improved its looks a little bit in the last versions (since 4.2 or so). It took a lot of "faith", I guess. To look it to the face and in spite of the visual shortcomings say: but it will look cool in the future. Sometimes I think it would be awesome to be able to attract great designers. So many people designing great web-widgets, or Gnome/KDE skins, or even Winamp Skins... The visual aspect must not be underestimated. Fortunately Pharo right now has, for me, reached the state where I "can live with it" (visually). One thing I would like to investigate is how easy (or not) is to write new Polymorph-aware widgets. > So these is years that I want to get a vector graphics based ui and a lot > more :) That's great :-) > just help :) > There are a lot of little tasks that can help us. > Like checking if a bug is still a bug in the current version. > I'm still learning a lot by trying (and I fail often) to fix something but I > nearly always learn something. Since you mention "helping" I would like to take this opportunity to mention what my plans for Smalltalk/Pharo are, and see if it can be beneficial to the project. For this, I better create a new topic...
