I don't buy it

Post #85,404 by tuberculosis 3/3/03 11:30:39 PM Reply	I don't buy it For example, IBM VA Smalltalk never achieved the market share of VisualWorks. I can't believe Swing is the result of a team of Smalltalk developers (although Lee Ann Rucker - who worked on VW - worked for Sun at Apple on Apple's VM/Lib adaptation. (ie, she came with the license I think). They would know better. As I remember it, Swing grew out of Netscape's Java Foundation Classes (JFC). I'd have to place most of the blame on Swing squarely on Netscape's shoulders. As for SWT - the Mac port still sucks - for one thing they targeted the legacy carbon widget set rather than the OS X one. So you can't say that this approach is hands down better - just has different pain points. I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customer got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. --Alan Perlis
Post #85,409 by bluke 3/4/03 4:05:48 AM 3/4/03 4:20:37 AM Reply	The basic facts are wrong Amy Fowler according to her own web page at Sun [link\|http://java.sun.com/people/aim/\|http://java.sun.com/people/aim/] started working on the AWT in 1995. This blows away the thesis that she came from the outside and was involved in the AWT. In fact according to this blog [link\|http://blog.xesoft.com/page/jon.lipsky/20030221#a_good_read_no_truth\|http://blog.xesoft.c...ood_read_no_truth] "Amy has worked at Sun since she graduated from college 14 years ago. The last bit of Smalltalk she wrote was in 1987 in a college course." After doing a bit of research on my own, I have also corroborated the fact that Amy Fowler has been at Sun for a long time since the late 80's.The only fact that may be right is that Amy Fowler is good looking. While the basic facts regarding Amy Fowler are wrong, I do believe that the Swing team looked at VisualWorks and tried to copy that for reasons that I enumerated in a previous post. That they failed miserably is a testament to how bad a language Java is and how good the VisualWorks developers are. Edited by bluke March 4, 2003, 04:20:37 AM EST Expand All History
Post #85,410 by bluke 3/4/03 4:10:01 AM Reply	Native widgets I used VA Smalltalk for a project in the mid 1990's and the native widgets worked very well. We started developing on OS/2 and then switched to Windows without a problem. We even delivered a version on AIX with no problems. I never used VisualWorks, but I remember in the early 90's one of the main knocks against Smalltalk (VisualWorks) was the fact that it used emulated widgets. The bottom line is that emulated widgets will never be 100% and as the article rightly pointed out why reinvent the wheel?
Post #85,654 by tuberculosis 3/4/03 11:09:14 PM Reply	Re: Native widgets I used VA Smalltalk for a project in the mid 1990's and the native widgets worked very well. This is no big trick. How many platforms does VA support? Right. Every platform adds a certain amount of overhead. Squeak uses emulated widgets (OK, they don't emulate anything - they just have their own widgets) and this pays off by making platform integration dead easy - you only have to support graphics blitting, event delivery, file system, and network - port done. The bummer is that your apps never look like platform apps - this may or may not be an issue. Depends. The OSX VM supports a bridge to ObjectiveC so you can use native widgets if you want - or not. This was easy because ObjectiveC is so close to Smalltalk. I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customer got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. --Alan Perlis
Post #85,420 by bluke 3/4/03 7:08:12 AM Reply	VisualWorks and emulated widgets I believe that VisualWorks uses emulated widgets for historical reasons. The product started in the late 1980's when windowing systems were just starting and in fact ran on DOS. In that kind of environment it made a huge amount of sense to write their own emulated widgets. Once they started down that path it was hard to change. However, in 1996 there was absolutely no good reason to reinvent the wheel with Swing and write emulated widgets.

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