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by briantrice 4193 days ago
I actually had a big vision to merge Morphic into the CLIM/DUIM tradition from Lisp and Dylan. I was very inspired by Lisp Machines, and still own one to run an emulation for for demonstrations.

Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.
2 comments
marktangotango 4193 days ago
>>not good enough to build the future out of

I think i hear this idea from the smalltalk community (or former community members) than anywhere else. The sense that there is supposed to be something out there thats an order of magnitude better than what we have today. Where does that come from? Whats so great about "the future" ie what promise does it hold?

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briantrice 4193 days ago
UI research and development stopped dead in its tracks in the early 90s, and most people who've developed UIs now effectively think a whole class of problems are not solvable or even worth thinking about.

XCode's Interface Builder is an Objective-C knockoff of a Lisp tool from the 80's which needed a lot of work even back then and never received it.

We're talking about two decades of extremely limited conceptual progress on interaction. The only GUIs that are run over network streams are HTML/JS/CSS, and those took about fifteen years to turn into fully standalone clients, and not terribly reliable or secure ones at that.

We still don't have a continuation concept (workflows that can be set aside like data items and continued at any point in time) in any shipping UI, despite that being demonstrated 10 years ago at MIT.

We still very typically treat dates and times as text strings instead of first-class manipulable objects whose identity is separate from presentation.

I could go on, but I'm just trying to convey the sense that our (known) future is stuck in the past.

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seanmcdirmid 4193 days ago
> Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.

Agreed, but the solution sounds like the whole naked object fad from a decade ago.

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briantrice 4190 days ago
Hum. I hear you. I've tracked demos come and go with their hype and lack of delivery.

Are they fads, though, inherently, or because of a lack of cultural and financial support? I like to learn from all of them but have no idea how to make a new effort that is worth more than just a splash of publicity.

My current bet is on just getting smart software in the hands of a wide audience that don't listen to programming culture.

What else can one do? Who are we rewarding by the way things work now?

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