[Seaside] [ANN] new Seaside homepage

Richard Eng richard.eng at rogers.com
Wed Jul 11 17:20:20 UTC 2007


I agree 100 percent. It really boils down to good documentation. As a
newbie, I would have really appreciated a detailed, up-to-date, non-trivial,
handholding tutorial that demonstrated some serious Seaside features and
programming techniques. This would've helped me to overcome my previous
file-based mindset. You can absolutely learn Smalltalk and Seaside *at the
same time* if you provide the proper tutorials and documentation.

Don't get me wrong...the existing tutorials for both Smalltalk and Seaside
aren't bad. But they're often out-of-date, and the examples are generally
too trivial to demonstrate what you can really do with Seaside. You want to
convince Java/PHP/Python developers to give Seaside/Smalltalk a spin? Make
it easy for them. You're already fighting against a file-based mindset.
Don't make it harder by offering inaccurate, simple-minded tutorials.

I'm finally getting used to the Smalltalk way of programming. But it wasn't
easy. Now I have to dig deeper into Seaside...

Regards,
Richard


On 7/11/07 12:42 PM, "Rick Flower" <rickf at ca-flower.com> wrote:

> On Wed, July 11, 2007 9:34 am, Richard Eng wrote:
>> Why is Ruby on Rails clobbering Seaside? I think the answer lies in
>> documentation--good, plentiful documentation. Newbie-friendly
>> documentation.
>> Moreover, RoR actually has published books! Seaside does not.
>> 
>> A good Seaside book would go a long way toward promoting Seaside...
> 
> I can't speak for others, but you could certainly give credit
> to RoR being the catalyst for me finding Seaside (care of a RoR
> blog post).. As for why it RoR may have a bigger following?
> At least for me, the biggest hurdle was learning the language
> and the environment.. If you're used to using traditional
> toolsets for C/C++/Perl/PHP/Ruby and countless others that follow
> the "file" based approach, Smalltalk can take a bit of getting
> used to.. The language works completely different than the
> others which really look similar to each other in many ways
> thereby simplifying the learning curve.  As I mentioned earlier,
> the toolset takes a bit of getting used to as well..  So, in
> summary, I don't believe the issue is with Seaside as much as
> it's an issue of wrapping your mind around Smalltalk in general
> and everything that comes with it.. IF you can take the time to
> learn ST, you'll be much better for it -- BUT it does take some
> time!
> 
> Just my $0.02US worth, which ain't much these days!
> 
> 
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