Guys - this reply has interesting content with potentially useful insight, but 
I really encourage everyone to think about how to best frame these kinds of 
comments without “sapping” the energy out of those writing frameworks like 
Spec. We all need to make sure that we can have healthy debate and iterate on 
new ideas but without causing others to feel despondent. 

We need to energise everyone in our conversations!  This was a strong message 
from ESUG this year (and we didn’t always get it right, but we tried to help 
each other do this).

If there are better ideas out there - you really want someone already working 
on something (which they may have spent lots of energy on already), to not give 
up in despair, but to seize the opportunity of new insight and apply their 
knowledge and creative to get a better outcome OR to iterate on their current 
solution and apply observations from others to create something better.

At ESUG, this was a topic of conversation for one of the “Show us your 
projects” slots (disclaimer - I presented that topic on the Zapp framework 
because I found a few of us in the pub going down a more negative path than we 
had intended).  I presented Zapp - 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zapp-Lightning-Empowerment-William-Byham/dp/0712680357 
and urged everyone to consider how we can ALL help each send sparks of 
excitement (aka Zapp) to encourage better things. This seemed to strike a chord 
in the audience.

I wanted to share this - because I certainly appreciate peoples thoughts on all 
of these topics, but I really don’t want to see us have more casualties in our 
amazing community.

So please - try and think “Zapp” not “Sapp” - and try and use your 
experience/advice/observations as a way to empower others to make useful change 
- or consider the direction they may be taking such that they want to do more.

Tim

p.s. This is easy to say/write - and quite hard to do well. I know we will all 
make mistakes doing this well - but practicing it is important, and having 
words like “Zapp” and a way to tell each other this is just as important as the 
code we write.


On 28 Aug 2014, at 19:15, kmo <[email protected]> wrote:

> philippeback wrote
>> Building a UI with Morphic alone is what one would use to do something
>> very
>> custom (like a game for example).
>> 
>> Now, creating a larger UI that way is definitely going to be super pain in
>> the assets.
>> 
>> That's where Spec does fit.
> 
> Is there any evidence of this? As far as I know no one has built anything
> more complex than a class browser. I would say Spec was incapable of
> building a complex interface of any kind. It's clumsy, developer-hostile,
> and counter-intuitive.
> 
> The whole Spec process of writing code in three different places is the very
> definition of a /super pain in the asset/s. it is far less intuitive to my
> mind than creating composite morphs.
> 
> Progress on Spec is glacially slow - but that's not the problem. Spec is
> profoundly misconceived and fundamentally flawed and offers nothing over raw
> Morphic. The Spec model is simply not how anyone would want to build an
> interface in 2014. I certainly would never use it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://forum.world.st/Roadmap-on-tools-tp4774285p4775282.html
> Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 

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