80s was the time of home computer with 1985 the rise of Amiga which was light years ahead of theme support, it practically established GUIs, GPU, dedicated hardware components, gaming, computer graphics and of course 3d graphics, together with many other things. Plus a theme was super easy to make because all you had to do is change the colour of foreground and background. Smalltalk lost its chance by making a huge mistake investing on Apple instead of Home computers. BASIC on the other hand did not make that mistake and its creators made sure it was available on every home computer. You turned on the computer and immediately sent you to a BASIC interpreter that acted also as the OS. It was BASIC that established the dark theme popularity as it chose it as its dafault theme. Smalltalk faded, BASIC became insanely popular and still dominates mainly through Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET. Smalltalk would have been amazing as game orientated , easy to learn , home computer OS replacement for BASIC. So I am not surprised that dark theme has been such a big discussion here even though its non existent discussion to any other software I have used.
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 7:03 AM Markus Stumptner <m...@cs.unisa.edu.au> wrote: > On 28/08/17 06:07, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > >> I completely agree - dark mode is great for content that you want to >> look cool, but no one consumes. :-) >> > > You assume wrong cause dark themes have been dominating GUIs for over 3 > decades now. > > Not really; bright on dark was only dominant in the days of the CRT > terminal when there were no "themes". (Even if you could do it as a > hardware switch, setting, say, a VT220 to black-on-white both looked > terrible as it was more an uneven gray, and tended to dim the tube more > quickly by burning in the background.) > > Instead, since full bitmap graphics happened, all screen interfaces back > to Xerox's prototype office systems, then Lisa/Macintosh, and then Windows > 2.1 have been using dark type on a white background for text work. Partly > this was because of the original office metaphor, but partly also because > it was shown that it was easier (meaning, less error prone) to read. > > Here's a study that showed that participants were 26% more accurate in > reading text that way (note that "contrast reversal" on displays in those > days meant dark characters on white background): > > Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual > display units through contrast reversal. > In E. Grandjean, E. Vigliani (Eds.), Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display > Terminals (pp. 137-142). > London: Taylor & Francis > > There were other studies in the 1980s that didn't report lower errors but > instead faster reading with black on white. Academically, the matter's > pretty much considered settled - black on white is better for most of the > population, and that's on screen, not on paper. (You can substitute any > degree of light or creamy for the white, that's really a variation of > screen quality.) > The engineering workstations of the late 80s and 90s (Sun etc) used black > and white as the application default as well, with white on black limited > to console/shell windows. This was partly for consistency with the old > style, partly for easy contrast with application windows in a multi-window > environment. > > > Pharo was the rare exception of using a white theme. Light themes may be > popular but white are definitely not. The web is the last fort of bright > themes, but the web was and still is eons behind when it comes to matters > of UI. > > Most other Smalltalks are dark-on-light by default all the way back to > Smalltalk-80 out of Xerox PARC. None of this had anything to do with the > Web, which came after, but which obviously also profits from the same > increase in readability. Rather than behind, Smalltalk was ahead and the > rest of the world followed. > > The dark theme as default in Pharo I personally consider a step back. As > someone who's been busy for 25+ years defending use of Smalltalk for real > applications, a return to a primarily developer-cool presentation instead > of a user-oriented default is IMO not a plus for a language branch that was > billed as more industry-oriented (which IMO is not exactly the same as > developer-oriented). But I also understand the desire to attract > developers with the look that's currently fashionable. > > That said, I wonder if the recent preference for dark among developers > (not Pharo-specific, but many languages) has to do with the rise of > widespread code highlighting. I could see how colour highlighting shows up > better on a dark background than being glared over by a white one. > > Markus >
