Ephestos as a project is not new . It started as blender addon details can be found here -->  http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?250375-A-Visual-Programming-Language-and-a-new-GUI-for-Blender-your-thoughts

Because the thread is kinda huge to sum it up what I and another blender developer did was to take morphic for python ( http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=30 ) which was written for python 2 and pygame and port it to python 3 , bgl (its a thin wrapper for opengl 1 blender library ) and as a blender addon. 240 commits later we had a morphic interface for blender written in python and ported to bgl so it could run from inside the blender window. Suprisingly we did not have so much problem with out own bugs but bgl proven too slow , buggy and unreliable so I had to abandon because I could only solve that problem with hacking blender source which is written in C and is almost not commented at all. Lets say here I am no big fan of C language of Blender source. 

Here you can find if you are interested the final blender python code ---> https://github.com/kilon/EphestosOld

From there on I was just searching for a home for Ephestos. I has quite reluctant to join pharo because of the lack of developers and because I am not that familiar with smalltalk as much I am with python. To be frank I am not that motivated to join a language that is has a very small community because of bug fixes and library support. I actually even looked into common lisp and emacs very recently as well since I really like lisp as a language and I prefer from smalltalk.

But it has become obvious to me that what I am trying to do for Ephestos is synonymous to what smalltalk is trying to do, to offer a live visual environment that makes code , fun , flexible and efficient. So I decided to take the deep dive into pharo. Smalltalk may not be super popular as python but porting all smalltalk stuff or even just little to python is just insane amount of work so I think I made the sensible choice to port my project to Pharo because it was already based on pharo libraries anyway.

Saying that I am still interested in offering some Blender support for Ephestos and thus making pharo able to quickly communicate with blender probably via a socket bridge. I got all these crazy ideas but I am willing to take them a step at a time , so that is why I talked about "decades".


From: Sebastian Nozzi <sebnozzi@gmail.com>
To: dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: "Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr" <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr>
Sent: Sunday, 25 November 2012, 20:43
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Athens OpenGL backend - what does it mean?

Wow!!! You have no idea how incredible I found to be reading something
like this: "I am willing to invest years and if all goes well even
decades of efforts since its an area that I love to code for". It
definitely made my day! :-) Especially the last part, that you really
*love* to code in this area (something I cannot but admire).

I always found the Squeak/Pharo environment so cool to code in, the
"aliveness" of the image, but also had the feeling that the graphics
system was a little outdated. Unfortunately being unable to do
something about it, first because I have no expertise in the area, and
second, because... well... I guess I'm lazy and not patient/talented
enough for graphics programming ;-). It is therefor great that Igor
and now you showed up, able to improve in this area, and also willing
:-)

To sum it up: I always thought that open-source Smalltalk should
*look* as great from the "outside" as it is cool on the "inside" (the
semantics).

It simply deserves no less.

So I am really grateful for any effort put in this. Pharo already
looks great, much has been archived, and I can't wait to see what you
guys will come up with next...

Best regards,

Sebastian


2012/11/25 dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk>:
> "eye candy" wise this is exactly the focus of my Ephestos project , Morpheas
> section. A custom gui , gui designers for easy creating of GUIs by the user
> and additional moprh widget with customized look including eye candy.
>
> I can't make any promises, as I have no clue what kind of obstacles and
> technical limitations I am going to find in the process but I can tell you I
> am willing to invest years and if all goes well even decades of efforts
> since its an area that I love to code for.
>
> As a first part I am in the process of creating a tutorial generator which
> will be ProfStef on steroids for at first offering tutorial for Athens and
> later used for any kind of Pharo tutorial.
>
> I am also interested in helping Athens porting to OpenGL and generally using
> NBOpenGL as the next step for Morphic. Excitting stuff the only thing it
> worries me is the type of technical blocks / obstacles I may come across but
> trying is certainly well worths it.
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Sebastian Nozzi <sebnozzi@gmail.com>
> To: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr>
> Sent: Saturday, 24 November 2012, 17:06
> Subject: [Pharo-project] Athens OpenGL backend - what does it mean?
>
> Hello Pharo Devs,
>
> I am really excited about the direction Pharo is taking regarding many
> areas - one of them being the graphics. I played with Athens a bit and
> it's cool to see anti-aliased vectror graphics coming to Pharo.
>
> I keep reading about a possible OpenGL back-end in the future... what
> would this mean exactly?
>
> For years I have been "dreaming" about graphic-accelerated "eye-candy"
> effects inside of the Smalltalk environment. Like compiz-fusion
> effects in Linux, or Quartz-Extreme powerded in OS-X (Expos�, etc.).
>
> Would this be possible with such a back-end? Or am I misinterpreting
> things? I'm not a graphic-dev expert.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Sebastian
>
>
>