genuine squeak newbie
John BEPPU
beppu at taurus.oac.uci.edu
Sun Jun 20 06:30:41 UTC 1999
# delurk
I find this discussion about attracting newbies interesting, because
I'm one of them. Let me give you guys a little summary of how I
arrived at Squeak, and what difficulties I'm having at the moment.
[ how I got here ]
programming history:
gw-basic (didn't know any better)
pascal (too restrictive -- didn't like it)
x86 Assembly (http://www.scene.org (demos are beautiful))
C (ditto)
Ada (way too restrictive -- trying to forget it)
C++ (kinda ugly -- didn't like it)
( discovered The UNIX Philosphy by Mike Gancarz )
/bin/sh (became one with Unix -- kinda forces you to
find creative solutions by piping stuff
through filters -- it's hard at first, but
when you get better, it's fun in a perverse way).
Perl (closures, garbage collection, pervasive use of
regular expressions, interesting approach to OO,
-- blew my mind -- I like it a lot -- so fluid)
( discovered Design Patterns by GoF )
Objective-C (I've found that I like most things that claim
to have a NeXT influence. Objective-C is no
exception. For a compiled language, it's
really dynamic. I really like it. Found out
that Smalltalk was a big influence, so...)
Smalltalk (not yet, but I'd like to learn)
[ my impression of Smalltalk ]
I've read a few texts about the early days of Smalltalk and Xerox PARC,
and I find it inspiring. I really like the part about bringing out the
creative spirit in _everyone_ -- that's a noble thing to want to do.
The language seems simple enough (although I haven't yet studied it
in depth). Time to RTFM and experiment with stuff.
to Luciano : I listened to that speech synthesis demo, and I'm really
impressed. Can you do realtime speech synthesis w/ Squeak?
[ what's difficult ]
I have fully embraced the Unix Philosophy. I have converted more
than a few people to the ways of Unix by demonstrating the power of
the Unix way. I'm not as skillful as the people who hang out in
comp.unix.shell and comp.lang.perl.*, but I am proud to say that
I have dropped jaws more than once by applying the Unix Philosophy
to little (but not so trivial) problems. I love one-liners.
Thus the Squeak environment is very alien to me.
- when I right click and see the pretty colored dots, what am I supposed
to think? (I think it's cool that the blue one at the bottom-right
corner lets you rotate windows (although it can get messy and
disorienting))
- Is there any way to configure sloppy-focus instead of click-to-focus?
- How does one run programs?
- How does one share programs?
What do Squeak people do for persistent storage?
- Should I even be calling them programs?
Are programs just classes that need to be instantiated?
[ ps ]
Is there anyone out there who uses Squeak as their primary environment?
--
/** beppu at uci.edu ......................................................... */
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