[Newbies] Raspberry Pi v. Raspberry St

Kirk Fraser overcomer.man at gmail.com
Sun Jul 5 23:22:29 UTC 2015


We should ask why do people want to teach Python instead of Smalltalk?  Why
do people veer away from Smalltalk with add-ons like Etoys, Scratch, and
many other paradigms like Patterns and CRC cards, which aren't as good for
commercial programming, thus really aren't as good to teach children?  What
can be done to remodel Squeak to provide all the features more commercially
popular languages have?

Earlier a post saying a boss didn't want a GUI that a combination of
buttons would bring up all sorts of things his employees shouldn't be
playing with.  So put a cleaner commercial GUI on the list. Maybe the
preferences switch could be in its own file or as the first character in
Sources to reduce file count.  The Changes file shouldn't be needed in a
deployed application.  Is there any way to cut the deployment image down to
one file containing both the Sources and VM like an .exe in any other
language?

I've written on the need to fix Garbage Collection control so it can be
turned off like Python allows to enable Squeak to be used for real time
projects like self driving cars, since a 100ms delay can veer 8 feet off
course, fully into a lane of oncoming traffic.

Recently I learned from a UC Berkeley website it takes 100ms to recognize
the objects in a picture too.  Does that mean the future will have a cloud
in every car and Squeak needing to conduct image analysis in hundreds of
cooperating cores to get safe real time performance?

The state of Squeak for all its benefits seems like a collection of law
statutes, a big set of text contributed by years of legislation that nobody
can remember all of and some of which makes little sense.  Maybe a major
rewrite starting from zero would help?

The GUI - while it has many nice features, it somehow seems to lack the
crisp precision, ease, and speed of commercial software like Solidworks.  I
like how Squeak comes up and is ready to go far quicker than say Amazon's
Audible application but Squeak graphics aren't so fast or easy to program
as Solidworks.

Recently I saw a couple of short videos on two moderate size robots where
users extolled their ease of programming.  Perhaps Smalltalk needs a new
top level rule based language to improve programmer efficiency.  I'm
working on this one.  And as my prototype was so easy, it angers me to
think of all the time I spent being both ignorant and afraid after seeing
various compiler books like the "Dragon Book" intentionally make compiler
writing a difficult graduate level course instead of an easy advanced
beginner level assignment.

But one thing I have in common with my Raspberry Pi, when my utilization is
maxed for too long, I overheat and shut down.  I can write simple stuff
like this when it's too hot to do real work.  But even multiple cores get
too hot when they are maxed out.  So a real time computer needs heat
control or cooling overkill in case a vital complex situation clogs the
bandwidth.  Well, pray about it.
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