[Moose-dev] Re: [ann] gt diagrammer

2018-04-09 9:14 GMT+02:00 Tudor Girba <tudor(a)tudorgirba.com>om>: Well, from the usage of it, I've seen nothing that doesn't fit into the yagt. I've seen that field evolve and try clever things, really different things, and Bloc does not look like one of thoses. Look, from the point of view of the man of the art, it doesn't seems like a breakthrough. Compared to other smalltalk-based solutions, yes, it may be seen as an improvement. I think you underestimate how advanced that field has been / is, and how far behind the state of the art are industrial solutions. There is only one development in the Smalltalk space in GUI that is worthy of interest for me: the anti-aliasing of Juan Vuletich. It would have so much impact overall (remove all dependencies on external libs, remove the need to do font anti-aliasing, scrap thousands of lines of slow and ugly Smalltalk code, simplify the FreeType infrastructure, remove MBs of external librairies, ensure long-term porting ease / code evolution). That may well be the key of the innovative aspect of it: not the design, not the software architecture, but the development stories around it. In the example Bloc application, what is interesting is the use of the GT inspector. All the code, the objects, the framework, feels underwhelming, at least not worthy of any hype, apart from: yes, it works. So what? But I think I told you about that before. I want to see your ideas about how to transform the development experience... I don't see Bloc as a very interesting development in that; it would have been a lot more significant to manage to do that over Morphic, for example. Because, you see, you designed Bloc so that it could be ameneable to your development experiences, and as such you're making it a lot easier on yourself; you're not proving the applicability of your ideas to GUI implementations, but the implementation of a GUI toolkit according to your idea requirements. And I do believe you would have done a very fine point of both improving Morphic, and proving your Ideas, and investing a lot less than with Bloc. (What Alain Plantec showed me of his early beginnings with reimplementing Morphic, the tooling he used: that was really clever.) Regards, Thierry