Re: my shortlist of GNOME wishes

[velokoi dircon co uk (Stefan Elisa Kapusniak)]

In list.gnome, "Michael D. James" <docjava@ricochet.net> wrote:

>Computers were supposed to help us automate things.  But on PCs I find
>myself doing a lot of manual repetitive tasks because I'm pointing and
>clicking instead of typing textual commands which could be put into a
>script.
>
>I don't know how to make a friendly GUI environment that is also
>friendly to automation.

   
  This is because there's a missing bit in most GUI
  environments, an all pervasive (and I mean ALL
  pervasive, as pervasive and all encompassing as
  elisp is to Emacs) programming environment that
  extends malleability and introspection to _everything_.
  In other words almost all GUIs have a great big
  Smalltalk shaped hole in them.

  NeXT filled that space with Objective-C, their
  class libraries, and Interface Building tools. But I
  don't think anybody has really attempted the required
  level of pervasiveness and integration since then,
  tho' I gain the impression that BeOS does to some
  extent.

  Have a look at http://www.squeak.org/ for a Smalltalk
  unfrozen from a time-capsule, thus with some archaic
  interface features around the edges, but currently
  under heavy development...especially take a look at
  the Morphic stuff and the Alice demos.

  The _problem_ from a conventional point of view with
  Smalltalk and anything like it, is the same as the
  advantage, the seamless intertwining of development
  and desktop environments.  These sort of beasts act
  as their own 'desktop environent', and would really
  prefer to be running on bare hardware or a small
  kernel with graphics drivers, to get the correct fully
  immersive effect (-;

  This implies everything being re-implemented primarily
  inside the Smalltalk (or Lisp, or whatever) box.
       
  Thus Squeak comes with 'integrated' web-browser,
  web-server (with scripting), mail-reader, 3D graphics
  environment all written in itself.

  Oops, looks like we're back to Emacs again (-;


-- Kapusniak, Stefan e