Cees de Groot wrote:

>Charles Hixson <charleshixsn at earthlink.net> said:
>  
>
>>And it shows in the language design.
>>
>>    
>>
>Careful here. Most of the stuff you're discussing below is not about the
>language design, but about the user interface. 
>  
>
You are clearly right.  Sorry about the sloppy usage.

>  
>
>>Sorry, but this is basic.  Dialogs need to look reasonable.  There needs 
>>to be a decent way to make them.  There needs to be a decent way to 
>>align the parts.
>>    
>>
>I'm quite sure that's all there (apart from the looks, but personally I think
>Squeak looks entirely reasonable and that's a matter of taste; luckily one you
>don't need to discuss at lengths, there's enough stuff about alternative looks
>on the Swiki :-)).
>  
>
I like it too.  But I wouldn't want to try to pass it onto my boss.  Too 
colorful.

>  
>
>>There needs to be a good way to secure them against 
>>right-clicks.  (I have been told that such a way exists, but the 
>>environment doesn't give evidence of it.)
>>
>>    
>>
>It is possible (just handle the appropriate mouseclicks yourself so the halo
>never shows up), but...
>
>  
>
>>Squeak is a great environment for programmers.  It seems to be a lousy 
>>environment to turn end-users loose in.
>>
>>    
>>
>the whole thing is a *great* environment to turn end-users loose in. It's
>indeed a lousy environment for Taylorian people who thinks that creativity
>should be confined to do just what the boss ordered them to do, but if you
>really want that, there's a gray striped suit equivalent of Squeak called
>"VisualWorks" ;-).
>  
>
I'll give it a look see.  (Is it cross-platform?  Nevermind, I'll check 
myself.)

>The fun of Squeak is exactly that after the programmer developed some basic
>components, the user goes on to make whatever he/she likes in the environment.
>That's the whole idea, no distinction between compile time and run time. 
>
>I concur that it is not exactly suited for the majority of office applications
>today, and it is possible to lock everything down (just download a copy of
>SqueakNews and see whether you can 'break in'), so again the answer is
>probably "you can do that, but it's not the mainstream idea behind Squeak so
>don't be surprised if you have to dig a little".
>  
>
But the environment that I am working in, and that I believe most 
common, is basically still oriented around paper, printers, and 
MSOffice.  And your dialogs need to look and act like theirs.

>>This could all be answered if there were a good way to create a "stand 
>>alone executable".  I notice that Dolphin sells that as their high end 
>>product.  But this is so basic that no professional application can be 
>>created without it.  (Well, maybe some, but none that I could use at my 
>>job.)
>>
>Strange world you live in. 'foo.exe' is all OK, while 'foo.exe bar.image'
>is suddenly "unprofessional". Well, I am glad that your users are
>so professional as to reject the majority of applications out there
>(Acrobat reader? Nay, lots of files. Photoshop? Sorry, can't use it -
>more than one file involved). What *are* they using? IIRC, even WordPerfect
>4.2 for MS-DOS was more then one file. (oh, and don't react on my only
>slightly veiled sarcasm here - it just sounds soo strange to me).
>
Sorry, again sloppy usage.  It has to look to the user like it's one 
application.  It could scatter files all over his system, and he'd never 
know.  But it has to look singular.  Each project needs to be separable, 
so that when it's called up, that's all that appears.  (And, practically 
speaking, I'd like to keep things a bit constrained myself.  Squeak is 
pretty good that way though.  Just pack everything into one folder and 
zip or tar it.  Then unzip it at the destination [into one folder].) 
 But as you guessed in the first paragraph, this is really about the 
user interface.

>
>It would be relatively easy, by the way, to patch the VM so that it looks at
>the end of itself for the object memory image; I wouldn't be surprised if such
>a patch is already floating around, but if not, I recall doing this sort of
>stuff back when I used MS-DOS with .EXE files, and it is quite feasible (and
>if there are more environments like the one you seem to work in, it might be a
>useful feature to have a sort of "freeze" button that wraps up VM and image in
>a single file).
>
Sorry.  Wrong problem.  Fitting everything into one folder is fine. (See 
right above.)

>  
>
>>The power of Squeak really amazes me.  It's so easy to create an 
>>animation.  Etc.  But the appearant weaknesses are equally amazing.
>>
>>The basic parts of most jobs are:
>>    
>>
>[daily life of office droid snipped]
>
>They maybe *are* the basic parts of most jobs, but *should they be*? That's
>the question that Squeak is prying at (well, maybe not directly for office
>work, although the first deployment of Smalltalk and a GUI was for office 
>work, IIRC - the current emphasis is more on multimedia, art, education). 
>
But the "question" I was responding to had to do with the use of Squeak 
in a job setting.  This is controlled by managers, and they tend to be 
quite conservative.  And data entry needs doing.  There is a large range 
of problems that are more easily solved by processing all items the same 
way.  E.g., complying with legal requirements.  I don't even understand 
what those requirements are.  I hope to never need to.  But a part of 
dealing with them is entering a certain collection of data for each 
"record" that is processed, and handling it in a particular way. 
 Closely specified, but quite domain specific, so skipping details. 
 This means that after I build something and get it approved, I can't 
have the process being changed.  (And if the way it looks changes, other 
than simple things like color, then I need to trace down what the 
changes were.)

>The work you describe as important (and, alas, as actually comprising most of
>people's daily lives at the moment) are a direct result of the division of
>labour as cooked up by Taylor. Lots of people don't agree with Taylor, and for
>them it could be a liberating experience to have a *really* personal
>environment with the basic tools to do their jobs and the full power to
>configure and organize their stuff the way *they* want it. 
>
>(think: what exactly is 'personal' with the average 'personal' computer in 
>an office these days?)
>
There's what should be, and there's what is.  I'm running into more than 
enough trouble trying to get non-MS software accepted, so the larger 
fight is beyond me.  And I'm not sure how certain jobs *should* be done. 
 A database from which reports are generated needs a certain amount of 
regularity.  I don't know of a better way to get the data in that via 
data entry, etc.  (As to who should be doing the data entry ... that's a 
separate problem.)

>>Then I say:  If I were to want to print this out, what would the 
>>printout look like? 
>>    
>>
>
>Then I say: what do you need a print-out for? I think that dead trees are
>decidedly suboptimal for the storage and retrieval of information when you got
>BookMorphs to play with.
>
I need printouts to send to my boss.  I need printouts to send to 
Sacramento.  I need printouts to send to Washington.  The other week I 
spend a long time matching the spacing and formatting of a form that was 
wanted in Sacramento so that I could use the printout from a database 
rather than having all thousand (nearly 2000, actually) forms be filled 
out by hand.  They wouldn't take any kind of computer readable file. 
 Not ASCII, not EBCDIC (I think they're still using IBM mainframes).

If it's a rolodex, I need printout so I can have a copy to carry around 
in my pocket.  etc.

Believe, printouts are important.  I also generate HTML (static, my 
program doesn't run on a server ... I can only pass files to it), and if 
the format were the same, then I could have the printout done by a 
browser, but the layouts are different.  (e.g., browsers don't have page 
numbers).

And the final point is:  I don't set the requirements for my job.  If I 
want to use a tool, it must be fit-in-able.  So it doesn't do any good 
to talk about what the requirments *should* be.  But if you want Squeak 
to be used in a work environment, then you need to have it "fit-in" with 
the requirements of the job.

(When I get home is a totally different matter.  I wasn't even talking 
about that.  My wife is rather entranced by just some of the tutorials 
on animation.)