GUI Painter

Hello Stephane :
Thank you for the welcome message.

> Second: our goal is to create an ecosystem around pharo...if you have...needs for business or anything else just let us know.


I'm a Mac OSX user and newcomer to SmallTalk and to Pharo. I have an uncomfortable feeling my question may entirely miss some significant point, whatever that is.

I'm puzzled why the only SmallTalk I've found which runs on the Mac, namely VisualWorks, has a GUI painter. However, compared to Xcode or even RealBasic (or Hypercard for that matter), the GUI painter seems remarkably primitive, given the length of time VisualWorks and SmallTalk, in general, have been under development.  

An up-to-date GUI builder with well designed, native widgets seems to me to be a prerequisite for a working software development application. Being required, for example, to program a button from scratch takes one back to the early days of personal computing.

What is preventing the various SmallTalks from offering a modern GUI painter?

My Best Wishes for Pharo and SmallTalk :
Hubert Wagner, France

On 27/09/2012 14:47, Hubert Wagner wrote:
Yes, it is a shame.

> An up-to-date GUI builder with well designed, native widgets seems to me to be a prerequisite for a working software development application. Being required, for example, to program a button from scratch takes one back to the early days of personal computing.
>
> What is preventing the various SmallTalks from offering a modern GUI painter?
>

Money.

And experienced Smalltalkers.

> My Best Wishes for Pharo and SmallTalk :
> Hubert Wagner, France
>

Well, everything goes to the web now, hence have a look at Seaside.

2012/9/27 Hubert Wagner <[hidden email]>:

Hi Hubert,

no, you are not missing a significant point. There is nothing inherent in Smalltalk that prevents having a modern GUI painter. Just as there is nothing inherent that prevents it from having many other modern development tools. It's "just" that there has not been a strong and consistent effort in those directions, which unfortunately has lead Smalltalk to lag behind in those respects.

Regarding the GUI stuff, Benjamin has been doing some good work on Spec, which should include a GUI painter at some point. So I guess I can say that we are trying …

On Sep 27, 2012, at 2:47 PM, Hubert Wagner <[hidden email]> wrote:



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Johan Fabry   -   http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD lab  -  Computer Science Department (DCC)  -  University of Chile

On Sep 27, 2012, at 7:47 PM, Hubert Wagner wrote:

> Hello Stephane :
> Thank you for the welcome message.
>
>> Second: our goal is to create an ecosystem around pharo...if you have...needs for business or anything else just let us know.
>
>
> I'm a Mac OSX user and newcomer to SmallTalk and to Pharo. I have an uncomfortable feeling my question may entirely miss some significant point, whatever that is.
>
> I'm puzzled why the only SmallTalk I've found which runs on the Mac, namely VisualWorks, has a GUI painter. However, compared to Xcode or even RealBasic (or Hypercard for that matter), the GUI painter seems remarkably primitive, given the length of time VisualWorks and SmallTalk, in general, have been under development.  

Lack of vision?
For Pharo we were just busy fixing so many things but this is on our roadmap.
Now with a UIBuilder you have
        - placing widgets
        - creating ***reusable*** widgets with logic reuse
VW is supporting that.
And we are working on that part too with Spec.


> An up-to-date GUI builder with well designed, native widgets seems to me to be a prerequisite for a working software development application. Being required, for example, to program a button from scratch takes one back to the early days of personal computing.
>
> What is preventing the various SmallTalks from offering a modern GUI painter?

for us this is money, give me 5 engineers full time and Pharo will not look like Pharo anymore :).

PS: Smalltalk and not SmallTalk

>
> My Best Wishes for Pharo and SmallTalk :
> Hubert Wagner, France