[Seaside] Newbie questions about Squeak and Seaside

[Warren Henning]

Hi,

I'm teaching myself Smalltalk with a free book I found on Stephane
Ducasse's website and Stephane Ducasse's book on Squeak for beginning
programmers. I know how to program fairly well so the main issue is
learning about stuff unique to Squeak. Here are some questions I have
which are mostly just requests for reassurance that it's worth my time
to invest in learning Squeak.

1. I have an idea for a web application that involves a lot of custom
text processing logic. Is Squeak an acceptable environment for
implementing a real full-blown application? How is its performance for
common tasks compared to, say, Python, Ruby, and Common Lisp? Do I
need to shell out for VisualWorks or something in order to get
real-world work done?

2. Do you always just edit one method at a time? Isn't that annoying
to have to click around so much? Do you always edit new stuff by
working on one method at a time in the debugger/browser?

3. I was playing with the counter example in Seaside and it appears
that continuation expiration is 600 seconds by default. Is the only
way to have user sessions last longer to simply increase the
expiration time? How do you do this for a real-world application?

4. Do you people ever find forcing everything to be object-oriented to
be restrictive? I think sometimes it would be as annoying as not
having any OO functionality in the language at all. I also think
having tons of 7-line methods is weird and unwieldy.

5. Is Squeak good for building things where functional languages do
pretty well? Things like compilers and interpreters.

I think the debugging and browsing tools are totally amazing (they
blow away everything else I've used, including SLIME for Common
Lisp/Emacs) but the actual editing itself sucks: I miss my Emacs
keyboard shortcuts terribly . The reason I'm learning Squeak is
because of Seaside, not the goofy "it's for
children"/games/multimedia/mouse gunk.

Warren