[Cuis] A formal presentation to the list

Wed Dec 11 07:37:50 CST 2013

Frank,
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for your clarifications. As I am new to Squeak/Pharo/Cuis, I don't
know how they evolved. But I guess that -perhaps- one lesson to learn is
what Juan says; sometimes as the system grows in complexity is hard to
avoid over cluttered images and thus a lot of stuff there becomes legacy
code as it's very difficult to track changes and maintain it. That's why I,
personally, think that having a sound, simple, fast, and elegant kernel
where "less is more" is the rule, is a very good point to start building
on.
Personal mastery is better achieved if one understands all the basic kernel
and then ventures on grasping other packages that may suit some other needs.
For instance, I think I can manage to know well and deep something like 500
classes. On the other hand, I'm almost pretty sure that I will miss a lot
if a system has 3000. But that's how it works for me, I know that other
people are able to grasp a whopping number like in Cincom ST.
I wish I could have the time to master a system like that, unfortunately
it's not my case.
My first encounter was with Pharo, then I took a look at Squeak and I felt
lost there, Nebraska, eToys, Universe an overloaded Morphic. Imagine that
for me, even Pharo is a complex system... but its complexity is handled in
a way that with sometime I know what stuff matters for me and what not, and
it seems it is advancing fast to gain a great deal of extra modularity -
even the Browser will be unloadable. Also it has some amazing packages like
Roassal, Moose..., a very good looking UI and full featured developer
tools. I'm confident that Pharo developers will manage to not only maintain
but increase its modularity. I also hope that Squeak continues advancing! I
will take a look at 4.5 -it's already released?.
Of course I'm with you that in the future the ideal would be that all
packages could be loaded in Cuis Pharo Squeak with minor modifications.
Thanks again and best regards
Nacho

*Lic. Ignacio Sniechowski, MBA*

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 11 December 2013 11:16, Ignacio Matías Sniechowski
> <0800nacho at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thank you, all of you for your warm welcome.
> > I totally agree with you. Simplicity is nothing but one side of the coin,
> > being the other code quality. It's impossible to achieve a certain
> degree of
> > simplicity and elegance without good code quality.
> > Once thing I'm curious is about the evolution of Cuis, how was
> developed. In
> > squeak.org says that it's a fork of Squeak. But closely inspecting
> Cuis, it
> > dawn on me that may be it was build from scratch. It seems that
> unloading,
> > correcting, fixing and shrinking Cuis is much more time consuming than
> > -using Squeak as a guide- build from zero.
> > I've taken a look at Squeak 1.3 or 1.2 and it was much simpler than let's
> > say 3.8 or 4.4 which is impossible to follow.
>
> Just for the record, I hope that 4.5 will be the start of a long trend
> of "getting better". We already started cleaning up messes in 4.4, and
> 4.5 has made a good start in addressing the inter-package complexities
> (that Pharo is now starting to get to grips with too).
>
> frank
>
> > Pharo has lots of classes too,
> > but everything is very good organized and once you know what is the
> purpose
> > of package X, it's easy to concentrate on those that matter for the
> project
> > being developed. Though IMHO I really prefer "extreme modularity" just
> the
> > kernel.
>
> This kind of "extreme modularity" is a goal both of the Pharo and the
> Squeak communities. It's my hope that not too long from now, the
> differences between Squeak, Pharo and Cuis will be much less, and that
> we'll see applications and libraries freely moving between the various
> communities.
>
> frank
>
> > If you need something more, then just loaded, only those things
> > needed for a project.
> > Is there some guide or tutorial on morphic on Cuis?
> > Thanks in advance
> > Nacho
> >
> >
> > Lic. Ignacio Sniechowski, MBA
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Casey Ransberger <
> casey.obrien.r at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Good to meet you! I'm in Seattle, Washington in the USA. Not terribly
> far
> >> from Ken as it happens.
> >>
> >> I did the main work around visual themes in Cuis, the original taskbar
> >> (which has since been replaced with something much nicer) and an odd
> little
> >> thing for moving assets in and out of the image called ContentPack. I
> also
> >> did some work to update our icons.
> >>
> >> In the future I look forward to contributing to the Morphic 3 effort,
> and
> >> to help continue Juan's earlier work with mobile devices.
> >>
> >> I was the second committer to Cuis (after Juan) and I must say that it's
> >> been a real joy to watch the community grow.
> >>
> >> It's a wonderful system. I think probably the strongest evidence that
> >> Juan's approach has been successful is that we were able to actually add
> >> features at the same time as removing classes and methods. Having a
> smaller,
> >> more manageable core opens up possibilities like this.
> >>
> >> Another part of this which is important to me is the idea that "the code
> >> is the curriculum," that the best way to make a complex system easy to
> >> understand and learn is to include only the highest quality code we can
> >> imagine, and avoid unnecessary complexity (or "complication") wherever
> >> possible.
> >>
> >> Glad to have you on the list, Ignacio!
> >>
> >> --Casey
> >>
> >> > On Dec 7, 2013, at 5:53 AM, nacho <0800nacho at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > My name is Ignacio (aka "nacho"). I'm a smalltalker apprentice, I live
> >> > in
> >> > Buenos Aires, Argentina.
> >> > I came to Cuis from Squeak's homepage.
> >> > Instantly get identified with Juan's observations, thoughts and
> >> > reflections.
> >> > It was like reading what I expect from a simple, powerful and personal
> >> > development system.
> >> > Cuis is amazing. Maybe it does not have Seaside, Roassal, Athens, etc.
> >> > But
> >> > that simplicity of only one person knowing all the aspects of the
> system
> >> > is
> >> > invaluable.
> >> > I work in a company and most of the software I need it's developed by
> >> > me, so
> >> > knowing the system deep it's something very important for me. And
> build
> >> > from
> >> > there.
> >> > Thanks Juan for developing such a wonderful Smalltalk environment.
> >> > Best regards
> >> > Nacho
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > -----
> >> > Nacho
> >> > Smalltalker apprentice.
> >> > Buenos Aires, Argentina.
> >> > --
> >> > View this message in context:
> >> >
> http://forum.world.st/A-formal-presentation-to-the-list-tp4728293.html
> >> > Sent from the Cuis Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > Cuis mailing list
> >> > Cuis at jvuletich.org
> >> > http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Cuis mailing list
> >> Cuis at jvuletich.org
> >> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cuis mailing list
> > Cuis at jvuletich.org
> > http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cuis mailing list
> Cuis at jvuletich.org
> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://jvuletich.org/pipermail/cuis_jvuletich.org/attachments/20131211/85bfac10/attachment-0004.html>