Squeak: Events, Modularity, Exceptions

Ted Wrinch ted_wrinch at uk.ibm.com
Mon Jan 4 15:11:04 UTC 1999


Paul said:

>Some people, like myself, are in both camps at various times. Perhaps
>this is common. Obviously, being able to justify Squeak use to
>management for grungy apps (like processing text files) would get it in
>the door for other fancier uses. Does this make sense at all? Is the
>second camp (or sentiment) present on this list to any extent? Am I the
>only one out here thinking Squeak could become an acceptable scripting
>language up there with Perl, TCL, and Python/TK? I would think many
>people would adore feeding program/text files to Squeak which were
>written in their favorite text editor (David Pennell brings this issue
>up in a recent "Re: Squeak book" post).

>As something to be concerned about, when the bulk of newbies show up as
>Squeak gets more publicity, I'd think they would expect Squeak to do the
>boring stuff, even if they other stuff (Morphic, Music, Wiki, Web, VM)
>wows them. But if Squeak can't do the boring stuff (i.e. the stuff
>Delphi does, VB does, C++ does, Python does), potential converts may not
>stick around (unless they got faith, like me :-). They certainly will
>have a hard time being able to convince their supervisor to use it for
>utilities or apps.

I could'nt agree more with all of this. Two recent run-of-the-mill experiences
suggest that if Squeak's inter-operability with other languages / environments
was improved it might get greater currency as a scripting / application
development enviroment itself:

1) I recently tried to use Squeak as a grungy text processing replacement for
the UNIX Awk and Sed tools (which wer'nt up to it). My problem was that our
team had no experience of / were not interested in other languages like Squeak
but would have accepted a packaged solution with a command line interface. I
could provide all of this using headless Squeak, except for the output of
results or errors to 'stdout' or 'stderr' (the former goes to the squeak
console window).

2) It would have been nice on the same project to have used Squeak to extend
the 'legacy' C++ code. To support this however does require, as Paul says,: '
being able to call in and call out of the system in a coherent fashion'.
Re-writing existing stuff is rarely an option but doing new bits / improving
the old stuff in a new language can be viable if the above functionality is
available (probably including the ability to import and read foreign data
structures).

Regards,

Ted Wrinch





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