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Cuis
Smalltalk
"Yay, Juan. You GO, guy! ...a great example of malleable software (and a clever mind) at work."
Dan Ingalls
"I like it... It's nice and clean and simple and pretty. Nice stuff!"
Alan Kay
"I think you have a very elegant design aesthetic."
John Maloney
Cuis is:
- Simple
- Small
- Clean
Like Squeak, Pharo and other Squeak
variants, Cuis is also:
- Open Source
- Multiplatform
Like other Smalltalk-80 environments
(including Squeak, Pharo and others), Cuis is also:
- A complete development environment written in itself
- A pure Object Oriented language
Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment
originally derived from Squeak (www.squeak.org) with
a specific set of goals: being simple and powerful. It
is also portable to any platform, fast and efficient. This means it is
a
great tool for running on any hardware, ranging from phones and tablets up to personal computers and servers.
Cuis is different from other Squeak variants
in that it takes an active attitude towards system complexity: As
systems grow older, they usually become more complex. New features are
added as layers on top of whatever is below, sometimes without really
understanding it, and almost always without modifying it. Complexity
grows without control. At some point, the
system can't evolve anymore and becomes "legacy code". The only
way to avoid this is by understanding the complete system, and
reengineering the whole system all the time. Keeping it simple and
consistent.
This is important. Complexity puts a limit
to the level of understanding of the system a
person might reach, and therefore limits the things that can be done
with it.
Dan Ingalls says all this in "Design
Principles Behind Smalltalk". Even if you have already done
so, please go and read it again! With
respect to code quality, Casey Ranseberger said "Because we are
volunteers without deadlines, we can raise the bar as far as we like;
in Cuis, we want to set that bar as high as we can reach. We want to
have to jump in order to touch it. But, perhaps paradoxically, we also
want to ship often, and we can respond to defects with the same speed
we experience in any (good) software engineering organization. In
short: Cuis gives us the best of both worlds."
You can see the Cuis and Morphic 3 talk at
the Smalltalks conference in Buenos Aires here.
Cuis is continuously evolving towards
simplicity. Each release is better (i.e. simpler)
than the previous one. At the same time, features are enhanced, and any
bugs fixed. Cuis includes recent enhancements from Squeak, but only
those that meet Cuis objectives: stuff whose complexity outweighs its
utility is skipped.
Nice comments about Cuis:
In addition to those quotes from my big
heros at the top, these are from other prominent members of the
Smalltalk community:
"Cuis represents the best of Squeak: Elegant simplicity, high quality, and a sense of vision... I really do appreciate Cuis."
"It has a clean, crisp feel and is a pleasure to
use."
David T.
Lewis
"It's
one of the smallest, definitely the fastest, and probably the best
structured (Squeak) kernel that has been built."
Andreas Raab
"If
you would like to see Morphic done beautifully, ...check out Cuis. ...I
simply cannot rave enough about how wonderful an experience it's been
to work with."
Casey
Ransberger
Some of the main ideas and objectives for
Cuis are:
-
Close to the ideas in Smalltalk-80 and
"Design Principles Behind Smalltalk".
-
Includes only kernel functionality + dev tools.
-
Included code should be of high quality.
-
Includes a greatly simplified and enhaned
Morphic as the main UI.
-
Easy to fix and extend.
-
Reasonably stable. Smalltalk kernel
should not
change much.
What is the audience? Cuis should be the
Smalltalk of choice to:
-
Smalltalkers who want a simple and consistent system
they can really master.
-
Teachers and students learning Smalltalk.
-
Developers working for devices with
little memory or CPU power.
-
People wanting to experiment with new
directions in language design, UI frameworks, etc.
-
People wanting a reasonable kernel on
which to build optional packages.
Compatibility
Back compatibility goes against progress. We
choose
progress. Back compatibility requires extra complexity,
of the non-essential kind. We choose simplicity. This means that there
are no guarantees of compatibility between Cuis and anything else,
including the various releases and derivatives of Squeak, or even other
releases of Cuis itself.
However,
Cuis is maturing, and changes start to be less drastic. The level of compatibility between Cuis version is increasing. Besides, Cuis is compatible to a large degree with Squeak. The only area where
this might be an issue is Morphic, as it is what has changed most.
Community
Cuis has a young community of developers and users. We have a mail list. You are welcome here! We also have a main GitHub repository, including an issue tracker. We
want to share fixes, enhancements, packages, and discussion with Squeak
and other Squeak distributions. Many of us are also part of the Squeak and Pharo communities.
Past Sponsors
Thanks, Folks!
Funding
Cuis is free software, done
mostly by volunteer effort. Finantial support is scarce. You can help
up keep developing it with your donation.
License
Cuis
is distributed subject to the MIT License, as in
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
. Any contribution
submitted for incorporation into or for distribution with Cuis shall be
presumed subject to the same license.
Portions of Cuis are:
Copyright (c) Xerox Corp. 1981, 1982
Copyright (c) Apple Computer, Inc. 1985-1996
Copyright (c) Contributors to Squeak and Cuis projects. 1997-2012
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