[Cuis] Fwd: Re: DIRECT version number

[Juan Vuletich]

Another specific comment:

On 7/20/2015 10:58 PM, Phil (list) wrote:
> I agree. The question is how do we accomplish this. My sense is that
> we are starting to chew up more of his time peppering him with
> questions / issues that he didn't anticipate resulting from recent
> changes.

This is a very good thing! I need to know the extent of the trouble I 
create when I change something.
This is no longer my private quest for the perfect Smalltalk-80. Your 
needs are really important now!
If some changes have issues I didn't anticipate, I need to know. This is 
another force (amongst a few others)
driving the evolution of Cuis.

> ...
> I don't think that most people will accept the compatibility through
> continual testing/fixing over a long period of time... most will likely
> give up after experiencing this for a while if they're attempting to use
> Cuis as something more than a playground.

I don't want that to happen.

> If the long term objective *isn't* for Cuis to be a platform, then an
> acceptable answer would be 'you're using it wrong'.  Or Juan could
> simply say 'yeah, ok... but I really don't want to do that...'

But now, after all these years, most of the worst, convoluted, horrible, 
apis and code inherited from Squeak have been cleaned. Right now, if I 
break something badly, and without any prior communication, it is most 
likely a mistake on my part. If I do such mistake, I'll be willing to 
fix it. I think this has happened a few times in this last couple of years.


>> ...
>> As an aside, I have found some breakage to be very enlightening and (sometimes painfully) helpful.  I heard that the Arabic word for "miracle" literally translates to "breaking the habit".  Interesting thought.
>> ...

Hehehe. Yes.

> I know you're generally pretty level headed and not looking to be
> disagreeable.  I engaged in this discussion because it is an important
> one to have and it felt like the right time to have it. A lot of what is
> being proposed is a change from how things have historically been.  But
> at the same time the pace of change has slowed down (ah, those whirlwind
> 1.x and 2.x days... :-) so it *seems* like trying to start to try to
> stabilize things a bit has relatively little downside.  (Dunno... maybe
> Juan is working on chucking the whole Magnitude hierarchy or something
> major like that right now...)

:D

No, the only important API change we have planned is to move from 
FileDirectory to FileMan.

We'll be doing relatively risky stuff, but not with the objective of 
changing APIs, although that might be a consequence. Some things I'd 
like to work in the next months / years are:
- Spur. The Spur object format requires a few changes in the compiler 
and core classes
- 64 bit. Having 64 and 32 bit images might also break stuff (?)
- Bootstrap from sources
- Switch to Morphic 3

Maybe I'm forgetting about something... And at some point, if possible, 
I'd like to integrate (or support and use as optional packages) Ropes 
and Unicode from Ken, VMMaker, code generation, VM simulation. Morphic 
programming for app developers should be easier and more convenient... 
And we might come up with other cool stuff to be done, that could 
perhaps impact a bit on APIs used by others...

>> What is the simplest thing that will work?
>> -KenD
>

That is indeed the question we need to answer.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich