Fluid menus.... wish list of K. Beck.

> From: Kent Beck <[hidden email]>
> Date: March 30, 2010 9:55:03 PM GMT+02:00
> To: Stéphane Ducasse <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: feedback on the bees book
>
> Please do forward my idea to the list. I'm available for consultation with whoever is implementing it. The key seems to me to begin with the goal--a more fluid programming experience--and work backwards to measures that approximate "fluidity" and a way of rapidly experimenting and getting getting concrete feedback.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kent
>
> On Mar 30, 2010, at 12:29 PM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
>
>>>
>>> That's one of the deep lessons of software development--the tortoise beats the hare. Every day you make the software better, it gets better.
>>
>> exact, so sadly. Smalltalkers got trapped in their nice little boxes and now lua is popping up as well as ruby or python. So many missed opportunities
>> and total lack of vision.

>>> I do enjoy Pharo. I find that it's still quite awkward with a Mac, from a click path perspective (too many gestures necessary for the common actions),
>>> but I don't have any concrete suggestions so I suppose I shouldn't complain.
>>
>>> I don't remember exactly which operations are hard to get to, except perhaps "extract method". I'd love to have Pharo instrumented so every menu item was tracked, then do a global optimization to reduce the number of gestures necessary to operate the interface.
>>
>> kent if you let me forward this mail to pharo may be somebody will do it just because you say so.
>>
>>> I suppose for completeness you'd also need to track the time between when a menu popped up and when the item was selected. This would avoid the Squeak problem of endlessly growing menus. I wonder if anyone has done this kind of quantitative UI design optimization before...
>>>
>>> Too many fun things to do.
>>
>>
> Yes ;)