Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 11th Mar 2003 19:00 UTC, submitted by Mike Janger
Mike Janger writes: "What is Open Croquet? Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI, etc.) is working on it. But what IS it? Have you guys looked into it?" I downloaded its 90 MB late last night. It's an 'academic' project featuring a futuristic OS 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on Windows or Mac. It requires a supported 3D accelerator (however, it didn't work with my Voodoo5 in hardware mode so it was painfully slow).
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"Two: "What in God's name is this? No applications? No compiling? Everything is open? I can't make sense of it all! I'll ignore it and maybe my brain won't melt.""
Any OS or program is a set of functions, whether they are simple traditional ones or "classes". The question is how to access and run them.
If you want to design a magazine, you need all the functions/classes for that task. Functions for typographical control, for importing image files from other computers, for writing out an on-screen layout in Postscript, for saving the project at various stages, etc.
IMO the big problem with the concept of having a general pool of functions (which is the same as having a lot of libraries) and no "application programs" is that nobody owns the set needed to perform a task such as DTP or MIDI sequencing or payroll.
The result is that nobody writes the boring functions. There are lots of versions of the fun stuff, like implementations of popular image-processing algorithms, but no professional-quality routines for handling tabbing in a printed document, or doing freehand painting.
The point of the traditional program with a name (like Quark XPress) is that someone is responsible for it, and if an essential function like tabbing is missing, they have to code it.