[HN Gopher] An introduction to Morphic: Self's UI toolkit
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An introduction to Morphic: Self's UI toolkit
Author : harporoeder
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-01-19 12:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sin-ack.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (sin-ack.github.io)
| notorious-dto wrote:
| Love Morphic. I implemented some ideas from it (in particular I
| borrowed the "halos" from Squeak Morphic) in my game engine a
| while back, and this year I'm rebooting the project:
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjVbxH1kdkQ -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqISKf7vGuw
| skulk wrote:
| A more recent implementation of this is Morphic.js[0].
|
| It powers Snap![1] which is the spiritual successor of Scratch
| 1.4 [2].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/jmoenig/morphic.js/
|
| [1]: https://snap.berkeley.edu/
|
| [2]: https://scratch.mit.edu/scratch_1.4
| neilv wrote:
| The screenshots of the Self morphs world inspectors are a blast
| from the past.
|
| When I was a student at Brown U. CS (same time as the much more
| accomplished Bryan Cantrill), the department had a good
| relationship with Sun, so students got to play with cool R&D
| stuff, like Self and Oak (Java).
|
| As I've mentioned before on HN, the research around Self did a
| few neat things we use today, and is worth looking at:
|
| * JIT compilation and runtime optimization,
|
| * prototype-based object model (and not just this, which we then
| saw in JS, but Self did this when OO was hot and it seemed
| everyone thought class-instance was the way to go, and only
| recently has mainstream PL been moving away from class-instance),
| and
|
| * the direct-manipulation morphs world, which seemed to go back
| to some of the promise of the PARC Smalltalk work (before UI
| thinking turned "and here's some examples of the kinds of
| interactive graphical objects we could have" to "these is the set
| of approved standard business form GUI widgets by which all shall
| abide").
|
| Those are the ones that I noticed and recall, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if there were more.
|
| If you want to play with morphs worlds today, besides what's in
| Self, I think Squeak has seen a lot of activity. In any case,
| it's also worth at least reading some of the seminal research
| papers around Self.
|
| BTW, the text aliasing in the screenshots didn't look that sharp
| on a CRT. :)
| coliveira wrote:
| I believe that the biggest problem with Self and later Squeak
| was never releasing a useful (killer) app that could
| demonstrate the advantages of the system. If you nowadays go to
| Squeak and open a standard image, there is nothing that you can
| say: this is an useful app that I would like to use. Even
| Plan9, which is by comparison a very esoteric OS, has managed
| to create useful apps such as Acme.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I would hardly fully credit Plan 9 for ACME, given that it
| just made Oberon text editing famous, and poorly given that
| it lacks document object model from Oberon.
|
| In any case, the main issue of these platforms is a bit like
| explaining monads and other complicated stuff.
|
| To really get the point of how those systems work, a person
| needs to invest time into the system until it clicks, and no
| matter how much we try to put the experience into words,
| there is only so much the audience is able to grasp, assuming
| it actually cares to pay attention to.
| krylon wrote:
| > BTW, the text aliasing in the screenshots didn't look that
| sharp on a CRT. :)
|
| Wow, now _that_ is what I call a blast from the past - the last
| time _I_ sat in front of a CRT was ... roughly 15 years ago.
| (-:
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