Notes on "Eva: An Event Driven Framework For Building User Interfaces In Smalltalk", Jeff McAffer and Dave Thomas, November, 1987.
This is an interesting assessment of Smalltalk user interfaces in the mid-1980s. Beyond that assessment is the design for a new user interface framework for Smalltalk. The framework is compared to Sun's NeWS and suggests Eva is better than NeWS in some ways.
The main similarities of Eva and NeWS are:
- Event-based
- Multiple active views
- Lightweight processes
- Portable interpretive language
- Reactive interaction with distributed applications
The main differences attributed to Smalltalk are:
- Smalltalk development environment
- Richer class library
- Better runtime garbage collector
- Better runtime performance
The advantage of these are to support more complex application user interfaces, for example CAD applications.
A prototype of Eva was developed in their Smalltalk/v system which ran in 600k. That Smalltalk was not truly multi-processing. The ultimate target for Eva was their Actra implementation of Smalltalk with "actors" providing true multi-processing. Subsequent work on their SmallScript system implemented the Postscript imaging model.
This already shows that blogging >>> tweeting, and all we need is to bring back RSS.
ReplyDeleteHi Manuel. Thanks for the comment. I hope to do more.
DeleteHey Patrick, Tim here. (First time interacting with Blogspot, see how this goes.)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, cool reading, thanks! By the way, I've been very much enjoying Adam Gordon Bell's Corecursive podcast, suspect you may as well. (Also, missing the Twitter interaction - are you active on anything more "social", like Mastodon?) Cheers!
Thanks for the comment and recommendation, Tim. I am not active on any social media at this time. I'm taking at least a brief hiatus from that level of activity. I'm enjoying writing a bit longer form though. I want to keep this up fairly regularly at least for a while. Hopefully people will find it, and find it interesting. I may get back on some social media down the road at least to provide pointers to these longer forms.
DeleteSounds good, and I can certainly appreciate the need to step back. Mine was Facebook, and trying to be a bit more thoughtful about how and when I'm spending my time scrolling on Twitter or Mastodon.
DeleteBy the way, Mike has posted at least one link here, and I do have your blog's RSS feed added to my list. (Yes, there is one, but it's not obvious. Maybe you can enable that?)
Also, strange thing with Blogger, seems like a dark pattern. I'm signed in to Google, so I am authenticated, but having no Blogger ID, comments are simply as "Unknown". Weird.
DeleteYou are seeing a dark theme? I have it set to be light. I've not seen yet if there's a widget to switch between dark and light.
DeleteI was able to add the feed links in the side panel. Thanks for pointing that out.
No, "dark pattern" as in an unsubtle way to influence the commenter into creating an ID on the platform just to be able to comment with their name. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
ReplyDeleteAh, yeah. I'm still captive to the billionaires here on blogspot and unfortunately the same for commenting. Eventually I intend to use this site just to serve as a pointer to a true indie web site. I may get back on twitter at some point just for that purpose as well.
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