Begin forwarded message:

From: Kent Beck <kentb@earthlink.net> Date: March 30, 2010 9:55:03 PM GMT+02:00 To: Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> 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:

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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. ...

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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.

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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.

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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 ;)