On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 2:18 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:
2014-09-16 14:37 GMT-03:00 Sebastian Sastre <sebastian@flowingconcept.com>:
Well, a while ago in the business list Iâve raised the idea that making Pharo able to do native OS windows would help it to gain market space (as in the opposite of staying at the margins of it).
So, Iâd be very positively curious about being able to use Pharo to do multiplatform native apps
The trend is shifting to mobile devices, iOS and Android are eating the whole market. So if it is about the potential market size, native mobile (tablets/phones/TVs) should come as the first option, before desktop.
+1. Desktop apps are "dead" aren't they? I'm doubtful that native windows would help Smalltalk's popularity, as evidenced, I guess, by the fact VA and VW have supported them for a long time; did they take over the world yet?
For development, native windows could prove very useful.
How so? For me, one of the worst aspects of trying to develop in VisualAge or VisualWorks *is* the multiple host windows. It makes it virtually impossible to work in more than one image, and reinforces the "grand cathedral" thinking about Smalltalk; e.g. you're not supposed to want or need anything outside your one, true, image. Dinosaur! I constantly work in multiple images, not only for separate projects but for the ability to quickly and easily fork images for multicore processing on the same project. Other times simply to try something temporary and possibly dangerous. The memory isolation is critical for productivity, the UI isolation for usability, and the multi-core capability for performance. I think we should focus on how to move to more and smaller intercommunicating images rather than one big image. I understand its appeal for _deploying_ an off-the-shelf desktop app, but I'm not aware of any other use-cases where multiple host windows would be preferable to one host window per image.