On Thursday 19 April 2001 01:41, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> The student wrote:
> >>> The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software
> >>> I've ever had to use.
>
> Compared with what, I wonder?  I've been using computers since 1974
> and GUIs since 1984.  Windows gives me screaming fits from frustration.
> MacOS makes sense, but Inside Macintosh made Squeak documentation look
> good.  Metrowerks is a pain.  I once spent a couple of hours trying to
> write Hello World in IBM's Visual Age for C++ and failed.  (Maybe a
> printed manual would have helped...)  I use Sun's Workshop moderately
> frequently.

I wasn't the student who posted that, but I share the sentiment. I mention 
the following points as someone who sees a lot of potential in Squeak, but 
who has had less than a fully positive experience with it over the past few 
months. Please do not take this as a flame.

-The first few days with Squeak were very difficult. I really didn't know how 
to do anything in the environment. I got over that, but it could have been a 
more positive experience. This isn't really Squeak's fault; it just happens 
that Squeak's interface is considerably different from anything else I've 
ever seen.

-Squeak's intense reliance on the mouse is likely to be frustrating for 
basically anyone but hardcore Macintosh users. I've heard all sorts of 
excuses for this, including at least one misapplication of Fitt's Law and 
various experimental data to show that mousing is faster than keyboarding. 
(It's true that mousing is often faster for new users in _unfamiliar 
environments_; keyboarding can become a much faster means of input for 
experienced users who know the shortcuts. A bit of keyboard window navigation 
would work wonders.)

-I've heard amazing success stories of Squeak images running continuously for 
years at a time, but over the past semester of working with Squeak for a 
class I've lost at least 3 hours of work due to random crashes and lockups. 
Recovering code from the changes file is a major PITA. To make matters worse, 
our class' Swiki crashes on a regular basis, frequently on the night before 
projects are due (this has happened at least twice out of six project 
deadlines). It's FAR too easy to fry an image. I've managed to do it 
accidentally several times.

-The user interface is... well, clean, I guess... uncluttered, maybe... not 
very pretty. I tried to spice it up a bit with various goodies, but that 
fried my image pretty quickly.

-The system is supposedly self-documenting, but much of the system is left 
uncommented and without help boxes. This makes it very difficult for 
beginners to learn the basic system classes. I've spent many red-eyed nights 
untangling the code to try to figure out what's going on, and I usually 
succeed, but a few more bits of documentation would help greatly. (Yes, I 
know, programmers hate to write documentation, and I'm pretty bad about it 
myself, but this small bit of effort would go a long way.)

-Morphic. This graphical scripting stuff sounds like a neat idea, but I took 
one look at such a "script" and found myself asking "WTF??"
The Morphic environment is teeming with cool features, but how the heck is a 
newbie supposed to figure them out?

The Smalltalk language is great. It's been difficult getting used to the 
Squeak system, though. Learning GNU Emacs was more difficult but less 
frustrating than becoming basically competent in Squeak. I'm starting to like 
it more as time goes on, but I don't know if I'll use it when I'm out of "The 
Squeak Class" (CS2340 at Georgia Tech).

So, yes, I can understand why a student might proclaim frustration with 
Squeak.

-John

-- 
Underfull \account (badness 10000) has occurred while \spend is active
John R. Hall  -  Student, Georgia Tech  -  Contractor, Loki Software