[Seaside] Re: Rails and Seaside

[stephane ducasse]

>
> I use Squeak in Linux, and I had some inexplicable crashes (usually  
> caused by the UI I think).
> I cannot reproduce them :( that's why I never filled a  bug report  
> about it. (maybe the windows/mac version is more stable).
> When I talk about "annoying" bugs, I refer mainly that some times  
> (at least to me) the debugger pops-up without an apparent reason,  
> that doesn't prevents me to continue using Squeak (some times I try  
> to look in the stack to see what happened... and some times I just  
> forget it and continue with my work) but I think that from the  
> point of view of a newcomer this is ugly.

Strange on my machine it nearly never crashes.
I have a mac.

> I'm pretty ignorant about the internals of the architecture... but  
> when I browse the morphic/ui/kernel classes, I think "mmm this is  
> full of spaghetti code".

Sure there are really ugly places. Let us face it but now we are also  
cleaning squeak :)

> For example the last week I was  trying to fix the "splitter" bug  
> in 3.9... and I give up. Having objects is not enough, you can also  
> make a unmaintainable program with a lot of Boolean flags... using  
> the True/False object :P (just browse references to Preferences to  
> see examples). I think that most of those small bugs are a  
> consequence of "spaghetti" code.

Yes. I would like to remove as much as possible as preferences. Most  
of them are useless.

> Usability? I've gotten used to the way things work. In fact,
> I often find other Smalltalks lack Squeak's features.
>
> Usability is not about features, and yes there is a lot of features.
> But give Squeak to a newcomer, and to the non-standard UI add small  
> things like:
> - menus are full of options without an "intention revealing" title/ 
> or sequence of actions, i.e: if you copy a morph to the "paste  
> buffer"... where is the "paste" option? (it takes me a lot to  
> figure that is "World->new morph->from paste buffer").

Yes!
Please help.
We will try to refactor and clean. But for that we need help and  
people supporting changes.
Because you have a lot of people that prefer not to fix things  
because they have different agenda.

> - default keys are not mapped in a standard way (in Linux, the  
> default is to use Alt, instead of Ctrl for saving and cut/paste),  
> yes you can configure it in preferences... but now try to find  
> where is the option
> - the standard pop-up menus with the "Changes not saved...OK to  
> cancel changes?"..."Yes/No".. why not simple a "Save/Cancel" (like  
> in Mac dialog boxes).

Send good code and we will integrate it.

> I know that these are small things, but if we are talking about  
> attracting developers to use Squeak and Seaside, we have to look in  
> those small things.

Yes

> (after writing down this list.. I think.."oh I'm a little stupid,  
> why I just don't fill bugs/wish reports instead of writing this in  
> an email".. yup)

Send fixes :)
and help.

> Maybe I was too critic about Squeak. The platform has a lot of  
> work, and is good in many aspects...
> But I want a better open-source St. been critic is just the  
> starting point :)

Sure the next step is .... help :)


Stef

PS: I will have a look at your automatic category organizer. It would  
be nice to be able to nearly avoid to have to enter
category names :).