On 10/02/22 9:33, Marcus Denker wrote:
So your “Systems which evolve over time need to have a very tiny core
which is supremely malleable” I actually think is very true.. and
Pharo clearly is not there yet.
(and what that even is supposed to be.. has many answers).
But what we technical people are the quickly to say
“a malleable system needs a very tiny core, so let’s first do that”.
And abandon what we have.
But if you step back, for the end-“user” (that is programmer) it would
not change much, it would solve nothing on that level of the problem
of how
to evolve a platform *and* the systems using it. Which might be even
harder to do right than the kernel...
Another aspect is that “lets build the perfect evolvable system” is as
impossible as “lets build the perfect system”… when you are done, you
realise that you could do even better!
Marcus
Recently I was seeing some videos abut GToolkit and Cuis and I thought
about how both approach to malleability/understandability in different
interesting ways: Cuis by providing a small extensible core that gets
simpler over time and GToolkit by providing a compelling default user
experience that invites to use and query the system in different ways.
I think that the ways Smalltalk systems approach malleability
(particularly Pharo/Cuis based) can have deep impacts for populations
beyond programmers, as showcased in my recent list post about sharing
data stories powered by Pharo, that in fact related with Malleable
Systems Wiki [1],
[1]
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/malleable-systems/doc/trunk/wiki/en/malleable-systems-wiki--23fm1.md.html
Cheers,
Offray
