Unfortunately, this seems to be no longer developed - last github commit is from a year ago. It might've been interesting to see another language with the image system.
I've been playing with Smalltalk recently, and it's really interesting as an environment. It has a number of RAD tools built in - the flexible Morphic GUI from which you can quickly create your interface and middle-click to debug any given morph, the image system allowing you to store state without explicitly dealing with a database, and being able to develop from the same environment that your code runs in, allowing quick turn-around in adding and testing features - and I'm wondering why it's not used more often for line-of-business applications.
I don't feel motivated to work on it (this particular artifact) any more. I want to make something relevant to and appreciated by an audience, and programmer culture seems to be unwilling to do that in a deep way.
If I continue, it will be with a specific story in mind about who it's for and what message to convey. I have been attending The Strange Loop for a few years now and growing some ideas to write about.
It's worth noting that Slate was one major project in a long stream of development I started privately in the early 1990's and then brainstormed with some nerds on at the TUNES project until I made Slate its own thing (a kind of stepping stone towards the TUNES goals).
For fun, I want to build a language. After see you can do a lisp very easy, I stop and wonder for what my "new" language can be useful. This make me think in how do a REPL, a debugger, what kind of task this must solve naturally, etc, and for which kind of users!
However, pull of a successfully language is very hard. That depress me.
I actually had a big vision to merge Morphic into the CLIM/DUIM tradition from Lisp and Dylan. I was very inspired by Lisp Machines, and still own one to run an emulation for for demonstrations.
Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.
I think i hear this idea from the smalltalk community (or former community members) than anywhere else. The sense that there is supposed to be something out there thats an order of magnitude better than what we have today. Where does that come from? Whats so great about "the future" ie what promise does it hold?
UI research and development stopped dead in its tracks in the early 90s, and most people who've developed UIs now effectively think a whole class of problems are not solvable or even worth thinking about.
XCode's Interface Builder is an Objective-C knockoff of a Lisp tool from the 80's which needed a lot of work even back then and never received it.
We're talking about two decades of extremely limited conceptual progress on interaction. The only GUIs that are run over network streams are HTML/JS/CSS, and those took about fifteen years to turn into fully standalone clients, and not terribly reliable or secure ones at that.
We still don't have a continuation concept (workflows that can be set aside like data items and continued at any point in time) in any shipping UI, despite that being demonstrated 10 years ago at MIT.
We still very typically treat dates and times as text strings instead of first-class manipulable objects whose identity is separate from presentation.
I could go on, but I'm just trying to convey the sense that our (known) future is stuck in the past.
> Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.
Agreed, but the solution sounds like the whole naked object fad from a decade ago.
Hum. I hear you. I've tracked demos come and go with their hype and lack of delivery.
Are they fads, though, inherently, or because of a lack of cultural and financial support? I like to learn from all of them but have no idea how to make a new effort that is worth more than just a splash of publicity.
My current bet is on just getting smart software in the hands of a wide audience that don't listen to programming culture.
What else can one do? Who are we rewarding by the way things work now?
There are others in the 'self' tag of the blog. A modern look at this type of environment, which Slate seems to be progress towards, would be interesting.
Slate development goes back many years. Perhaps sometimes you've got to let the field lay fallow for a season, before that next big burst of inspiration.
Had no idea this project was still active. Used to have some correspondence with an author (Lee Salzman) of the prototype oo multiple dispatch paper many years ago (over 10 now I guess), and had written my own implementation of it for a toy language of my own.
Good to see this still ticking. Though these days I'm more interested in static typed languages, this is still very cool.
Both of these, I feel, are interesting small offshoots that explore more in a pattern-matching metaprogrammable grammar direction, although they never became large visions or systems.
I've been playing with Smalltalk recently, and it's really interesting as an environment. It has a number of RAD tools built in - the flexible Morphic GUI from which you can quickly create your interface and middle-click to debug any given morph, the image system allowing you to store state without explicitly dealing with a database, and being able to develop from the same environment that your code runs in, allowing quick turn-around in adding and testing features - and I'm wondering why it's not used more often for line-of-business applications.