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by James Robertson.
Original Post: All I want for Christmas...
Feed Title: Travis Griggs - Blog
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7.2 is done ! This marks the third release of Cincom Smalltalk done in conjunction with the VW-Development mailing list. We're getting a steady rythm here. My congratulations goes out to the Cincom engineering team and all others involved. I consider the successive releases of 7.0 and 7.1 and 7.2 to be the highest quality Smalltalk products released from the long past halls of ParcPlace.
One of the things that develops in the cadence of the developement/delivery cycle is that there are times when "new features" are ok to suggest and times when they are not. My misfortune is that I seem to find myself discovering all of the features I want, about the time "feature freeze" is taking place. But since the 7.2 harvest is just freshly reaped, and because Christmas wish list time approaches us, I thought I 'd blog my desires. True to the christmas wish list, as a whole, it's probably more than even Santa can deliver.
Get a new name. VisualWorks is more than a decade old now, and it is very last decadish. Get a mascot too.
The Config Map Thing. It's been recognized and in the works for a while now... but I haven't seen it. Have you?
SRE. We definitely need it. But please. Don't call it that. What better way to say "us too!"
Package Categories. Yeah, that's right, I never thought I'd want something like that. Alan Knight voiced it once (no idea whether he was even being serious) and it's been resonating since. I watch people use Bundles as Packages and Packages as categories all the time. And then struggle to "categorize" their code so it will load right? Please. I just want something lightweight. We're talking truly just categories. At most, let them have sub version numbers. Never let them be first class entities.
Mac OSX Support. I thought this was the creme de' le creme of xplatform solutions. I'm using BF for Mac OS X right now. My windows don't show up when I hold down the mouse over my dock item. It uses CTRL C/V instead of Apple C/V to copy paste! So on and so forth.
Filenames. Support for links. Support directory manipulation (copying/removal/moving). More robust copy/move semantics.
Use the OS's GraphicContext facilities better. And allow more hooks for manipulating window decorations too.
Alpha support in the color/image model. Simplify the plethora of unfathomable color configurations. Clarify once and for all the depth vs. bpp qaugmire. And maybe we could make the SymbolicPaint stuff a little clearer too.
AOST. It was a great presentation. I wanna see it used to do some fast byte bashing now.
Fonts. Quit snapshotting them at startup time and consuming 4+ MB of Smalltalk memory which can't be resynched. Font servers are there, for well, font serving.
Unify parcels and packages. But please, oh please, keep the cool features of Parcels (partial loading, overriding). You can throw out the arbitrary object storage bit though. :)
I dare the engineering team to go thru one release with a pragma freeze in affect.
DLLCC External Dictionaries. These things are an everlasting legacy of bad design and development headaches.
Last, but far from least Pollock, of course.
And finally, my pet peeve. Get a move to namespace refactoring.
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