SmalltalkNeedsANewUI

I've had a quick look at PharoSmalltalk. And it's certainly quite nice. An improvement on SqueakLanguage.

But I have a more radical / somewhat idiosyncratic desire. Which I know is probably not something that actual SmallTalk people relate to. But I think it would be a winner.

What I think is, that part of the "cruft" I'd like to see a "blank slate" Smalltalk get rid of, is the "desktop metaphor" and all those silly little overlapping windows, icons, pull out menus etc. Morphic and whatever else.

That doesn't mean go to something like GNU Smalltalk. No, I still want a live environment that's Smalltalk all the way down.

I just don't think anyone wants a desktop metaphor in 2018.

If I'm going to write a "desktop" app, then I don't want it stuck inside another non-standard app. And if I'm not going to write a "desktop app" I don't want the overhead of having to think about and implement that kind of interface.

What I think Smalltalk should look like in 2018 is something like JuPyter / iPython notebook. Or, at a pinch, HyperCard.

I open "Smalltalk" (whether that's a browser-based version equivalent to Amber, LivelyKernel or Peter Fisk's Smalltalk Express, or a desktop version like PharoLanguage or SqueakLanguage), and what I see is a "smart notebook" type metaphor :

A single page that takes up the whole window. To which I can start adding "cells" or "cards" containing either code or "literate" style documentation, or output produced by the code.

You'd still have tools like the Class Browser etc. But they'd be integrated within the same UI. Ie. the class browser is just more "pages" in the notebook. There's no workspace or transcript because every page can have live code on it.

This UI is immediate. And focused on "do something". You don't have to learn how to navigate around a non-standard UI because it's the conventions we're already used to from the web and our mobile devices. Navigation between pages, appending "cells" or "cards in the stream" the kind we're used to in chat apps.

Other UI conventions would be services that look like bots in Slack or Telegram eg. services at a name which can be invoked in a cell on any page through a little dialogue. And there would be notification streams too. "RecentChanges", recently generated output. Messages from other users (it should be easy to share individual pages with other users)

I think if you took the underlying Smalltalk engine / VM / image. Stripped out all the legacy "desktop UI" stuff, and replaced with a simpler "multi-page notebook" metaphor, then it could be massively more compelling to people. It then becomes a "personal notebook" for doing little sketches / experiments.

If it's also "social" ie. has chat streams. Or is like the Smallest Federated Wiki. Or has other ways to sync sketches and pages etc. then this would be spectacular.

And the Smalltalk VM / infrastructure is perfect for it.

But right now, anyone who looks into Smalltalk to see what all the fuss is about is confronted with an alien / non-standard ugly desktop, full of unfamiliar tools. Sure, that "Welcome to Pharo" window with all the tabs is an improvement on other systems. But it's still not good enough.

I open Pharo, and I don't know what to "do". How to start playing around and doing something useful and fun.

I thought NewSpeak might be the closest thing to this, as it has a more web-page oriented UI. It's promising, but looking more, I see that currently, it still has quite a lot of the older Squeak UI in it. The "web-page" UI is actually built out of objects that emulate a more traditional Smalltalk UI then rendered as web.

So it adds layers of complexity rather than stripping them out. Though I'll keep watching to see if this changes.

See also CoolProgrammingLanguageIdeas which contains a Quora answer with a variant on this.