Just a reflexion that I’d like to share here. When Hilaire talks about complexity. I have to agree too, even if I like the progress under the hood, and explored spaces like GToolkit.
But how to change such legacy beast, the pharo image ? Potential is huge but resistance is also tough for so few people… Just imagining changing method protocols seems so complex at the end ! Instead, I’d start with minimal images, bootstrapped ones. A system I would love to understand every bits. I’m pretty sure this is what lots of us have in mind and the progress in bootstrap has been teasing us ;-) <dreamMode> For instance, I’d want minimal images that would be able to deal with collections of informations (text/data processing) with (web)socket connectivity or whatever cheapest way to communicate. It would be some kind of information store, a minimal image that can store information objects and that I can interact with a client in a full pharo image (or in a web browser). Wouldn’t it be possible to start from scratch, literally from nothing (nil) and define little by little what necessary and along the way define minimal protocols, minimal Object class and then iteratively a clean collection hierarchy until … (for me) … the information store. That would probably need some filesystem support but it’s not an obligation. I’d far prefer web socket stream support and interaction with object only within the image. Another image could be responsible of exporting information objects to files… It also need some basic mime types support and probably parsing (xml/html, json, geojson, ical, …). I don’t know well. But it has to be iteratively done anyway. I imagine there are not one but several images (and therefore source code) that would lead to functionally equivalent images. There should be some ways to abstract functionalities we expect of a system (if people have pointers on that) ? We could even imagine like a Contest to come up with the nicest pharo images (contest driven by tests ^^). Depending on the functionality coverage, that’d be just crazy to see similarities between code/images… </dreamMode> Is it feasible, does some of the remarks makes sense to some of you ? At least, Caro, as we talked a bit, your writings on such a quest will be terrific, and I’m sure well followed ;-) Have a nice Easter Monday, Cédrick
