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
