[Newbies] Feedback: Using Output as the Next Input

[Kirk Fraser]

Frank,

App delivery depends on your goals.  If you are a miserly Scrooge at heart,
you'll consider all your code proprietary or your customers too stupid to
learn Smalltalk, so you can write your code in your own collection, keep it
out of the System Browser, and hide it in a single variable, or adopt a
restricted sandbox GUI like eToys uses which hides the Browser. But if you
have a more loving view of your customers, you might decide to give them
everything plus a tutorial on how to modify the source Smalltalk to suit
their individual desires.  Most business customers will find it cheaper to
hire you to make changes either way since you'll have the knowledge and
skill to do it faster than they could.

One of the most disastrous miserly tactics I've ever heard of was a vendor
put a time check on his code and if it wasn't updated every month it would
fail to work, thus insuring continued payments he figured.  But his
tricking the customer failed when he went on vacation and didn't supply an
upgrade one month, the system crashed, and the customer had to find a new
solution.

Kirk Fraser
This is being done in poverty www.reliablerobots.com

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Dan Norton <dnorton at mindspring.com> wrote:

>  Writing and reading files can be done easily. For Cuis, I summarized the
> protocol in World > Help... > Terse Guide to Cuis > File Streams. If a file
> is used for the output, then it will have to be parsed in some way in the
> future. By compiling it into a class method which answers a Dictionary
> accessed by the drawing methods, no further parsing is needed.
>
>  A GUI might be appropriate for a user who does not like computers, but a
> definite requirement IMO is to not have the IDE obvious.
>
>  I'd like to use this discussion  to provoke comment on app delivery in
> Squeak and Cuis. If you google 'Future of Smalltalk' you'll find a concise
> statement of the problem: "One of the big problems ... which prevents the
> take-up of any "workspace" based language (Smalltalk, APL, Forth etc.) is
> that it's really hard to work out what it is that is delivered to the
> customer." - Frank Carver http://www.efsol.com/FrankCarver.html.
>
>  On 2 May 2015 at 9:26, Ralph Johnson wrote:
>
>  >
> > Writing to a file is very similar to writing to the transcript.
> > You need to open a writestream on the
> > file, then you write to it.
> >
> > If I were writing the data out, I'd probably try to write it out as
> > a CSV (comma separated values) so
> > that I could read it into a spreadsheet.
> >
> > If you want to make it easy for people who don't like computers,
> > perhaps you should make a GUI
> > for it.  The GUI might list all the drawings in the top pane.
> > When you select a drawing, you get to
> > see its contents in the bottom pane.
> >
> > I assume that when you run drawn2012 it returns some kind of data
> > structure that gives you the
> > drawing for 2012?
> >
> > My son had something like this.  He had his program send each
> > person email, telling them who
> > they drew.  If you wanted to do this, you could focus on how to
> > send email instead of on how to
> > make a GUI.
> >
> > I'm not sure what your motivation is here.  Is your main aim to
> > learn a little Smalltalk?  To make a
> > useful tool for yourself?  To make a useful tool for someone
> > else?  These are all worthy goals.  My
> > advice would depend on your goal.  And of course, goals change.
> > You might have started out just
> > wanting to learn Smalltalk but now you just want to make a tool that
> > someone else can use so you
> > don't have to be in charge any more.
> >
> > On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 8:07 AM, Dan Norton <dnorton at mindspring.com>
> > wrote:
> >     Dumb questions can have uses after all. Thank you Hannes and
> > Ralph for your thoughtful
> >     responses. You must have been digging into the archives - my
> > original post was nearly a
> >     year ago.
> >
> >     Perhaps it is time to say what I chose to do. Design of Secret
> > Santa was driven by:
> >        1. A desire for simplicity
> >        2. Relatively infrequent use (annual)
> >
> >     Input is a text file listing the names of participants. A pair
> > of names on the same line
> >     denotes
> >     a couple. Output consists of the result of drawing names,
> > compiled as a class method.
> >     Method names are serialized: drawn2012, drawn2013, ...
> >
> >     The Transcript shows the latest drawing, as a Dictionary, which
> > is compiled. Below that in
> >     the
> >     Transcript are the statistics (iterations, rule violations). The
> > image must be saved.
> >
> >     I would appreciate any thoughts on application delivery. The
> > above is a very crude, if not
> >     non-existent, way to deliver an app. Use of external files for
> > output would improve things a
> >     little. Isn't it possible to do better than this for a Smalltalk
> > app? What if the user is not a fan
> >     of
> >     computers?
> >
> >      - Dan
> >     _______________________________________________
> >     Beginners mailing list
> >     Beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> >     http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/attachments/20150502/74df10d7/attachment-0001.htm