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by Ian Bicking.
Original Post: Squeak/Morphic Demo
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I just finished watching a video (sadly in Real) of a talk by Seymour
Papert and Alan Kay, speaking about math education using computers
and programming. The really the neat part is about halfway through
where Alan Kay starts doing demos using Squeak and the always-mysterious Morphic
(and they seem to have a new site, Squeakland, embodying legendary and
only recently truly revealed Etoys).
I used Squeak quite a bit several years ago, but found it extremely
difficult to achieve that last 5% of the development process -- great
for making toys, but hard to make real tools. And Morphic was really
a big part of what pushed me away -- besides the performance issues
(which are very significant to this day, despire Moore), Morphic is a
deeply cryptic system (classic ravioli code) with
little effort expended at the time to make it accessible to a
programmer. The rest of Squeak, while not particularly well
documented, had a sort of simple beauty that made it accessible, the
quintessential example of good object-oriented programming and a class
hierarchy that served as better documentation than narrative could
have. Morphic isn't like that -- to many small features only become
sensible when viewed in the larger framework, and its own object model
which you could only see in relief. It was obviously born of a strong
vision in the creator's mind, and perhaps it is well communicated in
the informal lessons that happen in the Squeak core team if not to the
wider public... and perhaps with its maturity you don't have to
understand it -- it's concrete, you needn't program it, you can simply
manipulate it. But this is obviously not satisfying to a programmer.
Still, I find myself intrigued, and I have a childish desire to make
my own race
car. Everytime I've tried to go back, I find myself both
intrigued and frustrated; maybe it's still worth one more go. Despite
the pessimism of the last paragraph, it's an awesome demo, and it
leaves me a lot of things to think about. More later...