simon.bates at hushmail.com wrote:
> 
> Thanks a lot for your reply. I was thinking that the original aim of Smalltalk
> was to provide an environment in which you can do all of your work. That
> is, to essentially have a Smalltalk system as your Operating System and
> for the Smalltalk image to replace the regular disk filing system. However,
>  from the recent discussion on forking Squeak I get the sense that people
> also use Squeak like just another development platform and that they want
> it to integrate into their regular operating system. Do people use Squeak
> as their primary enviroment and the image as the primary place to store
> data?

It's kind of a mixed bag, actually.  Some types of things (e.g. editing source code) are virtually always done within a Squeak image, other things (e.g. storage of large images or text files) people will usually use the native OS file system for, and some other things (e.g. reading email and web browsing) are roughly evenly split between those who like to do it within Squeak, and those who prefer to use external tools.  (As tools such as the email reader and web browser in Squeak improve, more people may start doing that within Squeak.)

So, it's hard to classify Squeak as purely as purely standalone or not.  Squeak certainly depends on the OS providing at least a basic filesystem.  (Even when people discuss porting Squeak to "bare hardware" without an OS, I think there's an assumption that there will still be some sort of simple filesystem outside of the image?)  Although this could change in the future.

On the other hand, Squeak is definitely *not* "like just another development platform" on Unix, assuming you're talking about development as in programming or scripting.  Nobody uses vi or grep to edit Smalltalk source code, the special browsing tools within Squeak are much more powerful than vi/grep for this purpose.  So, in this sense Squeak very much goes against the Unix tradition of using your favorite text editor and command line tools to work with whatever programming language you happen to be dealing with, e.g. Perl, C, Python, etc.  If you start seriously using the tools within Squeak, you'll realize that this is a good thing. :)

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com