[Newbies] Raspberry Pi v. Raspberry St

Dan Norton dnorton at mindspring.com
Sun Jul 5 23:54:20 UTC 2015


On 5 Jul 2015 at 16:22, Kirk Fraser wrote:

> 
> 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?
> 

" like a collection of law statutes" is a good analogy. Cuis seems like a major rewrite of 
Squeak and is simpler, easier to understand. What do you think of Cuis?

> 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.

 - Dan

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