[Cuis] A formal presentation to the list

Wed Dec 11 07:55:21 CST 2013

Juan,
Very interesting indeed. You should write this stuff :).
Honestly, at least for me.
Thanks for sharing.
Best regards
Nacho

*Lic. Ignacio Sniechowski, MBA*

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 9:43 AM, <juan at jvuletich.org> wrote:

> Hi Nacho,
>
> (inline)
>
> > 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.
>
> This is a great question. Which approach is better? Well, before Cuis,
> I've been using Smalltalk-80 derivatives for a long time. Alan Kay, Dan
> Ingalls, the Xerox Learning Research Group, Squeak Central,  they are my
> heroes. It never occurred to me that I could build something as good as
> Smalltalk-80 by myself from scratch!
>
> Additionally, I started this by myself, in my free time, without any
> financial support. I wouldn't dare to start from scratch, because I wasn't
> sure at all I would have enough time and knowledge to bring it to a usable
> state.
>
> So, the approach was to find an area of the system that I find difficult,
> and while trying to understand it, clean it, so it would be easier to
> understand in the future. Rinse and repeat. Bounded work, usually between
> one week and one month in my free time.  The advantages of this approach
> have been:
> - I could learn as I go. I didn't have to know everything about
> Smalltalk-80 before starting.
> - I always have a working system, since day one. If development stops for
> whatever reason, the result is the best Cuis up to that moment.
> - It is possible to adopt the really important fixes and enhancements done
> at Squeak. For example, Closures and Cog compatibility, enhancements and
> fixes to Compiler and stuff, many fixes to numerics stuff, etc.
> But you are right, a properly staffed and financed team, starting from
> scratch, could have done in much quicker :)
>
> > 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.
>
> Cuis was forked from Squeak 3.7, when 3.8 was already out, and 3.9 was in
> the works. 3.8 added support for Unicode. I think Unicode is important,
> but I don't agree with the approach taken. Unicode support required so
> many deep changes that  I thought it would be easier to fork before that,
> and port later useful fixes, than to remove Unicode from the image.
>
> Removing Etoys, MVC and many other things allowed me to bring the image
> back to 1.3 size, enabling evolution, and a deep redesign the internals of
> Morphic, etc.
>
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>
> > 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. 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.
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
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> >> > Cuis at jvuletich.org
> >> > http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
> >>
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> >
>
>
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