>>When teaching Cobol-people, I
>>noticed that they'd severe problems with that select&action pattern of
>>Smalltalk. They were keyboard-centric people.


I've noticed that programmers accustomed to traditional language's and
development environments (including the newer IDE's) have a very
"source file centric" view.  You show them how to write some code and
it doesn't take long before they get nervous about where "their" code is.
How do I save my source.  Then you get to discuss "the" source file,
"the" changes file, fileOut, changeset management and management of the
whole process.  The traditional development environments give you a nice
safety blanket.  When things go bump, you always have the ascii source
to fall back to and start over with.  The start over process is identical (or almost so)
to the normal process...  [notice the tie in to the earlier "project file vs makefile"
thread...]

>>>>The browser needs wizards to create classes and methods.
>>>Nahhh...
>>Never said that you must use them, but try to explain the funny effects
>>that occur if you make some errors filling out the class creation pattern.
>>Strange error messages or even system crashes because somebody just
>>redefined Class upto recompilations of the whole system can occur.
>
>:)))... yeah, it's true... but I dunno. Maybe it's better to let such
>errors happen because then when someone looks for the reason there's a lot to
>learn by oneself.


The enviroment should allow for exploration not require it.

>>>Break points I don't know... maybe not. I guess they're most probably
>>Well, just because I want to stop the execution, I don't want to modify a
>>method and "polute" the change set.


Amen!  Has this been done in any of the other Smalltalk environments?


>You know, it would be nice to use
>
>self trace soTheDebuggerOpensAndYouStartTracing
>
>instead of
>
>self halt failAndThenOpenTheDebuggerAndThenStartTracing


Is there any reason not to do this?  I almost always proceed to the debug window.

>>All I want in Squeak is, that $ñ isLetter or $á isLetter or $ä isLowercase
>>all answer true instead of false.
>>As Western European, I'm happy with Squeak default font which
>>resembles ISO Latin1  (I don't know), but I can hear the complains of
>>Russians (not talking about people of Far and Near East) who demand their
>>letters.  Perhaps the best solution would be to switch to Unicode.

With run-time support for Unicode, we could start with doing simple things like
allowing Celeste to read this e-mail or extending Scamper to read the SUGAR
Web pages or adding localized IDE's.  This seems like a good pluggable primitive
project.

-david