<font face="arial" size="2">Can someone please remove me frrom this list ?<br /><br /></font>
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<b>From</b>: smith02243 <add_aaron_2_x@hotmail.com><br /><b>Sent</b>: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 8:52 AM<br /><b>To</b>: beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org<br /><b>Subject</b>: Re: [Newbies] more of a general smalltalk question</font>
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<br />cdrick wrote:<br />> <br />> An idea: learning from source code could be documented too by small<br />> "how-to".<br />> <br />> For instance to understand how sandstonedb works (which is already<br />> well documented thanks to Ramon) we could imagine that:<br />> <br />> HOW-TO-LEARNING SDActiveRecord "file oodb persistency inspired by<br />> ruby activerecord framework"<br />> -restoring persistent objects<br />> <br />> "put a self halt in SDActiveRecord class>>warmUp" (wich is called at<br />> startup for activerecord like objects,<br />> "save and quit". then<br />> "start again the image".<br />> This opens a debugger that will help you understand how persistent<br />> objects are restored... Debugger will open on Mock classes that exists<br />> for test reasons. It will also open on all your active records<br />> (subclasses of SDActiveRecord)<br />> <br />> etc etc...<br />> <br />> This is a small documentation effort that would be precious. We could<br />> also illlustrate with videos which if we had standard tools could be<br />> done without too much effort (I mean less than getting all done with<br />> text only)...<br />> <br />> see: http://www.squeaksource.com/SandstoneDb/<br />> <br />> My 2 cents ;)<br />> <br />> Cédrick<br />> <br />> _______________________________________________<br />> Beginners mailing list<br />> Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org<br />> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners<br />> <br />> <br /><br />I strongly agree that the source code must be supplemented with something.<br />GNU Smalltalk has excellent library documentation. Admittedly, in Squeak<br />it's easier to browse the source-code thanks to Squeak's GUI, yet proper<br />documentation would still be a huge boon to development, especially for<br />neophytes. <br /><br />Furthermore, in Squeak by Example there's this quote by Alan Knight:<br /><br />Try not to care. Beginning Smalltalk programmers often<br />have trouble because they think they need to understand<br />all the details of how a thing works before they can use<br />it. This means it takes quite a while before they can <br />master Transcript show: 'Hello World'. One of the great leaps<br />in OO is to be able to answer the question "How does<br />this work?" with "I don't care".<br /><br />We cannot really take that advice seriously if we force users to browse<br />source code whilst building their applications. This is especially<br />detrimental to new users, who generally want to start building applications<br />as soon as possible, and care little about implementation. If they're forced<br />to care about implementation I would guess they'd prefer to use something<br />else, something with better documentation and a rival set of libraries,<br />Python for example.<br />-- <br />View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/more-of-a-general-smalltalk-question-tp18288372p18352304.html<br />Sent from the Squeak - Beginners mailing list archive at Nabble.com.<br /><br />_______________________________________________<br />Beginners mailing list<br />Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org<br />http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners<br /><br />