Hi.

>I think it better compares to either the people who think that the way is 
>the goal or the other people who just want to reach the goal.

Ah yes... I meant that it has been hard to "sell" big systems in Smalltalk 
just because Smalltalk... well everyone knows Microsoft but Smalltalk? Oh 
well... :))). NRN.

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

Hmmmm... interesting... maybe language programmers are also very 
keyboard-centric... ah yes. They have to type lots more. I wouldn't believe the full 
sources in say C++ for all the things Squeak already has to be about 6mb...

>>>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.

>>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.  

Ahh!... okok now I got you.

>And again, while "normal" break points
>are intuitively usable, people have to understand the full set of Smalltalk
>syntax before they can correctly insert "self halt" statements.

Hmmm... the morphic debugger could just replace the drawOn: for "self halt" 
with a fancy banner saying "BREAKPOINT"...

You know, it would be nice to use

self trace soTheDebuggerOpensAndYouStartTracing

instead of

self halt failAndThenOpenTheDebuggerAndThenStartTracing

Another button for the debugger that could prove useful is the Turbo 
Debugger's animate feature... you just set the amount of time that goes by between 
execution of each instruction and watch the show... step and stepTime...

>>Several attempts to obtain translated Smalltalk systems to Spanish and 
>>Portuguese failed miserably because of gender.
>Same here in Germany.  However, you misunderstood me (or I didn't make the
>point clear). I just suggested a translated IDE where the browser has a
>"Ausf¸hren/Ausgeben/Untersuchen" menu instead of "doit/print/inspect."

Wouldn't it be neat then to rename classes and so?... then selectors?... 
but with the wizard browser then most details from selectors would be hidden 
away... I wonder what would happen with consistency.

>Have you ever tried to teach Smalltalk to people who never learnt english?

Yes... the names of classes and selectors I stumbled with were quite clear 
after a moment... for instance:

OrderedCollection
ColeccionOrdenada

It's not that different... although the most problematic issue about syntax 
was gender and number... err... singular/plural stuff. Maybe I was just 
lucky.

>Once I taught VisualWorks to some East German ladies who eventually...

:)))...

>Well.  Now at once, it's not only a strange language where every message
>selector must be learned like a strange vocabular but also the whole IDE is
>alien.  All other major programming languages have IDEs which are 
localized.

I think that the IDE is more of the compile and then execute world... in 
Smalltalk that doesn't happen, I mean... the world is running the "IDE" let's 
say and the "IDE" is being used to modify the state of the world, all at the 
same time. On the other hand, traditional IDEs use the contents of some graves 
to get a new Frankenstein... ouch! :))) Just kidding. I mean that the IDEs 
cannot modify the world they run on because it's fixed, in some sense it's 
dead because it doesn't grow and it's not alive by itself. And they finally 
build up just another program like the IDE, running in a world that can't change.

>eineCollection := Collection neu.
>eineCollection tue: [:jedes | jedes anzeigeZeichenkette]
>(Arg, this sounds really strange, even if it's somewhat German. :-)

What does it say?...

aCollection := Collection new "ok"
aCollection do: "?" [:each "?" | each "?" doSomething "?"]

>>Accented vowels are extremely irritating in any programming environment. 
So 
>>spelling is also broken on the way. Simple words as child, year, 
tomorrow, 
>>morning and even Spanish in Spanish contain Ò.
>All I want in Squeak is, that $Ò isLetter or $· isLetter or $” isLowercase
>all answer true instead of false.

Okok, I meant for typing. Spanish programmers never (except some odd case 
which I don't know but probably exists) use accented letters for coding even 
in Spanish... the Ò is a bit more usual since it happens in commons words, but 
anyway the problem is that if you remove those away then problems arise when 
sharing code because of odd names chosen to avoid accented letters and Òs...

>I think, that shouldn't be difficult to
>add.  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.

Although I admit it would be quite personal, I'd love to use the TeX fonts 
for Concrete Mathematics... :). I wrote a TeX fileOut little package a while 
ago, to file out Smalltalk code in TeX format so it would look nice. Has 
someone here done a TeX compiler to dvi or something??? I think that there was 
something done already. Maybe I can use it to play with TeX math objects in 
Morphic...

Andres.