Re: RAD: was Orbiter - a personal http app server

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Javier Guerra Giraldez
<javier@guerrag.com> wrote:
> GUI framework (on one of the very first GUI systems), and with it the
...
> interchanging of objects: most views could show most models, and most
> controllers didn't care what kind of data the other two were about.

That was the beauty of Smalltalk (and Lua); as long as the duck quacks...

> principles, although it's not uncommon to see a group of three objects
> specialized to work only between them.

Yes, you can clearly see this in the Table GUI widgets in GTK+ and
Java Swing, there's a model, the actual table that shows the data, and
a selection object that handles user interaction. After several days
of intense headache it starts to make sense, but it feels like
unnecessary rocket science; 'accidental complexity' to use Fred
Brooks' term.

One cool thing about Smalltalk was that in a real sense the
application was the environment, which was persistent.  You worked on
the live system, incrementally. It's something I find myself doing
increasingly with Lua, especially with big systems with significant
start-up time like servers; programming as live surgery.

steve d.