If I could just interject my 0x02 here...I've been touching Smalltalk on and off for several years now (Thanks to Squeak I have a decent environment!). However my first encounter with Smalltalk was back in the very early 80's when I was still in elementary school...I saw a video about 'new' technologies and it showcased Adele Goldberg giving a tour of the Smalltalk-80 system running on either an Alto or a Star (memory is a bit fuzzy on this). I believe this was pre-Mac and definitely pre-Windoze. From that point I've never truly been able to seperate the GUI from the object...the Smalltalk environment made a lot of sense (which is probably why I've never liked or gotten used to regular C-based GUI programming). It only really makes sense to me to do GUI programming in an object-oriented fasion; C++ is better than raw C for this (although MFC can make me cough hairballs :). However, none of it is _fun_ to do, it's more of a tedious chore that detracts from what you are trying to do (I still shudder when I think of my first Motif-based program...)
In my limited experience with Squeak & Morphic, I've found it to be pure bliss compared to my C/C++ endeavours...with NO documentation I've figured out a lot and I'm amazed how easy it is to put something together...not in a lobotomized Visual Basic way, but in an intelligent and natural way... (well, natural to a programmer anyway).
I've always thought of things in artistic terms...the painting is the end result (what you are trying to visualise) and the programming language is the tool or brush. I think the C/C++ way has created a tool that is more complex than the end result..it ends up obscuring what you are trying to visualize since you spend more time learning how to use the tool than creating your work of art. Refreshingly I've found Smalltalk to be the other way around...the tool is easy to learn and almost seems like a natural extension of my thoughts.
Anyway, enough of my rambling...I just have to agree that Smalltalk/Squeak is a much easier way to do anything GUI related...and a heck of a lot more fun, too.
(I must thank the Squeak team for making this wonderful environment available, and even taking the time to respond to my silly questions too...)
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