[Newbies] Looking at Squeak

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Thu Apr 26 03:55:18 UTC 2007


On 4/26/07, email at noblebell.com <email at noblebell.com> wrote:
>  My question, can I develop shareware applications in Squeak that are
> standalone and also crossplatform?

Yes, you can.  Squeak applications are automatically crossplatform.
You can keep an application from being crossplatform by doing silly
things with file names, but it is very easy to ensure it is
crossplatform.  On the other hand, it is a fair bit of work to make it
standalone.  Squeak applications are normally bundled with the
programming environment.  You can get rid of the programming
environment and make the application standalone, but it takes work and
the details are too complicated to explain to someone who doesn't know
Smalltalk.  Just go ahead and learn Smalltalk and develop your
application.  Once it is nearly finished then you can figure out how
to make your application standalone, and by that time it will not seem
complicated to you.  Laborious, but not complicated.

Smalltalk is the opposite of C in this respect.  C makes it trivial to
make a standalone application and very hard to make an application
with built in debugging.  Smalltalk makes it easy to make an
application with built in debugging and harder to make a standalone
application.  Overall, it is a lot easier in Smalltalk.

-Ralph Johnson


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