Jim,

	Before even reading any further, you probably knew what made me
responding to this excellent posting of yours. :-)

<QUOTE>

As noted, there is a difference between Squeak the programming language,

and Squeak the environment.

</QUOTE>

	and 'Squeak the environment' is the (only ?) killing app for
'Squeak the programming language'.
	and surprisingly little hase been changed for 3 decades ;-)


<QUOTE>

Lisp and a few other languages also have "it". "It" is life. Squeak has
this completely different view of the world from most other programming
languages, and it even brings its own house to live in. The world Squeak
lives in is alive. Squeak builds live objects. Squeak consists of live
objects. Squeak is live objects.

</QUOTE>

	You are touching on a very religiuosly religious issue.

	Lucky for those who can see and draw a line between live and
dead.

	And for that matter, between live and non-live.

	Certainly, no one would argue if there is anything live at the
first penetration, for sure, everything is so live. ;-)

	But does life start when the second penetration is accomplished
? When the sperm really got inside the egg ? Does life start there and
then ? Or not until the first mitosis ? Or not until there is a heart
beat ? Or not until there is a birth certificate ? Or not until being
baptised ?

	And when does death begin ? Is a person in coma dead or alive ?
Is a frozen Bill (to be waked up year 3001) dead or alive ? Is being
alive more elegant than being dead ? (Not being alive, at first it may
be hard to do certain simple thing like pushing an empty can of pop, but
with patience, a non-living thingy can kick-ass more beautifully, if
anyone has any doubt about this, don't hesitate to email Demi Moore and
ask for details ;-)
 
	As I said above, life and death is a very riligiuosly religiuos
issue. Maybe that's why someone chose to discuss related things instead,
say intelligence.

	Someone (Minsky ?) asked himself what is intelligence. If one
was trying to identify intelligence ? What would one find ? An onion ?
The Core of Intelligence is just that NothingNess, the rest, layer by
layer, are just algorithms and heuristics. (Please correct me. I am not
sure if Minsky discussed about intelligence with little demons this way.
I don't even recall the article's title, the book title).

<QUOTE>

By contrast, most all other computer languages (and certainly all the
mainstream ones) build dead programs. 

</QUOTE>
<QUOTE>

The cult of dead has borrowed some of the ideas of Smalltalk and used
them, such as "object oriented programming", garbage collection, and
virtual machines.  

</QUOTE>

	Just as the cult of dead has been mimicking the ideas of
Smalltalk poorly, it also poorly mimics the biology, microbioly with
what they call 'worm', 'virus' and pretend that these things are alive
and think that they can scare the world.

	The world have not seen anything yet. Wait for the day when
Squeak take over the world, get all the attention of all those
'destructive' hackers and make them learn Squeak.

	Now that these hackers have in their hands the real live objects
to carry whatever mission to be assiged. I cannot wait for that day. I
can expect nothing less than at least one super SqCop (released by SqF
:-) guarding each port to fend off dozens and dozens of live objects
with whatever name the hackers would choose to use. (may be it's a good
idea that SqueakFoundation should trademark the prefix 'Sq' now ;-)

<QUOTE>

For example, to start writing virtually any dead program from scratch
you have to figure out all the libraries and such that you will need to
perform even the simplest tasks. In Squeak, all I have to do is call my
minions by name and they are at my side, ready to roll.

</QUOTE>

	Now I understand why my boy insists that cookies jar, potato
chips, chocolate bars, a glass of yogurt, a can of rootbeer, a couple of
apple, one pear and a Gameboy should be right there on his desk together
with his math book, microscope, a keyboard and a Mouse.

	My wife is simple, all she wants now in the master bedroom's
bathroom is a kitchen sink  ;-)

<QUOTE>

So when I hear talk about killing most parts of a Smalltalk environment
to produce a 20K FreeCell executable, it is very sad. You've basically
banished the FreeCell away from his family, and sent him to die in a
lonely corner of the world. The FreeCell should be among his friends,
where he can laugh and play and have a good time. Note that this is
different than having a slimmed down version of the image (which in my
mind should be built by some type of cross compilation process, rather
than amputating objects out of a living
image) for specific tasks. I also understand the need of task oriented
solutions, where the end user is locked out of the development
environment.

</QUOTE>

	Please, don't feel so sad. Please, don't be so upset. It's not
the end of the world (glad to see you smile :-).

	FreeCell is far from being banished, he is just a signal away
from his family and his friends. 

	For friends, it's good and fun to have party once in a while.
But just think of having party every week, then every day. I am not so
sure if it's still fun. Besides, even if you can afford a party every
day, do you invite ALL 'friends' ?

	For family, I hope you do not insist that your children and
grand children and grand grand children and ... will share the bath
rooms in your house every morning and the TV sets every evening.

	Don't you think that your children would rather have their own
dwellings when they grow up and have a family of their own ?

	Don't get them wrong, they are just as close to the family as
before. Just a phone call, one email or a puff of smoke (signal), they
will be right there again in a big warm family.

	20K FreeCell is just a puff of smoke, giving the signal to all
friends and members of the family coming together for a wonderful game
of solitaire. (BTW, 20K is a bit bloated, it should be around 10K ;-)

	And you are now cordially invited to this wondwerful game of
FreeCell.

	Cheers,

	tounge-firm-ly-in-cheek-ly-yours'

	PhiHo.



-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Jim
Benson
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 2:30 AM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Squeak UI and toolkit commentary: (was: Re: Who has no job?
(was Re: O'Reilly Squeak book?))


Charles,

I have the exact opposite answer as to what Cees de Groot gave as
comments to your commentary.

Modern personal computers are usually owned by people or businesses who
have spent their hard earned money to acquire them. They have a vested
interest in being able to use them. Most people that I have met want to
be able perform some specific set of tasks with their computers, whether
de Groot deems those tasks to be necessary or not.

As an example, most people that I know want to be able to sit down and
type in a letter, then print it out using their machines. They want to
check their spelling, they like to use different fonts and maybe even
include some simple illustrations if need be. Whether this is mandated
by this Taylor character is irrelevent, that's what people like to do,
and have voted so with their wallets. I would guess that for 95% of
these tasks, simple applications provided with todays modern Windows and
Mac OS (such as Wordpad and SimpleText) provide a pretty compelling
solution. Squeak doesn't do that very well currently. Same with other
mainstream applications such as spreadsheets, paint programs and such.

As for printing things out on paper, just rearrange what Enzo Ferrari
said about fuel injection for car engines when it was first introduced:
"If someone invented carburetors after they invented fuel injection, do
you think fuel injection would remain a dominant force?" Paper has a
great many advantages in comparison to a computer, plus it's dirt cheap
and requires little power. Do we need paper? Uh, yeah, thank you for
asking. For a lot of people, computers are a great way to process paper.

So we know that most people have an investment in their machines. The
machine manufacturers include operating systems which are supposed to
provide a unified way to interact with your computer. You have windows,
a blinking caret, scrollbars, buttons, etc, all with a common "look and
feel". Most people on this list agree that this is not an ideal
interface. Personally, it seems to me that these interfaces are a pretty
good impedance match for the hardware that has been available for the
last ten years, but I probably don't know any better.

So what's the deal with Squeak? Conceptually, you could just dismiss
these arguments with a simple wave of the hand, "Yeah, it *could* look
(or act) this way if you wanted it to; it's pretty close as it is", and
just move on. You can also scream and shout that "Squeak is the best" as
loud as you want. You can also say that current WIMPs suck, and that
Squeak is "the way". So the few hundred of us (who can't really even
agree between ourselves) "know" better than the 100 million on the
outside with their own machines. You might find this surprising, but the
outsiders aren't buying in.

Look at it another way, they've already made their investment. They've
learned the various intricacies of operating their machines OS. When
they first use Squeak, they want to know what the screw is going on
here? And not from the perspective of "Now that's some really nice
programming". What's the benefit of learning another environment? Sure
there are a couple "killer apps" in the Squeak world, but overall the
learning curve is very high for people who are task oriented, and the
reward relatively low. Maybe this Taylor is responsible for this
behaviour, but I don't think so.

I've had quite a few laughs the last few days reading the list with all
of the different suggestions to make Squeak more mainstream. These
suggestions have ranged from let's write another book, let's have more
documentation, let's have a better website (including my favorite
comment of the entire last year, something along the lines of "Let's
make sure the HTML on the web site is good (well formed) so that people
will take us seriously").

I'm not against any of those things, most all are obviously good ideas.
I think there are different issues here. My first question would be,
"Why do you care what others think about Squeak?". I think this time
would be better off spent making Squeak better for the people who use
Squeak. What does "mainstream" mean -- and why in the world would you
devote any energy to getting it?

 I can tell you why *I* use Squeak, and I've got to tell you upfront
that I disagree about some of the projects that go on here in
Squeakland. However, since they don't really effect my work (other than
those modules) I say "go nuts, have some fun".

As noted, there is a difference between Squeak the programming language,
and Squeak the environment. On the list here, I've seen people state
that Squeak has a difficult syntax. What in the world are they comparing
it to??? From the programming side, I have faith that people who can
understand the syntax of C++ or Java have a chance at understanding
Squeak. I also think that most non-programming types stand very little
chance of understanding C++ or Java. The syntax and the language Squeak
is fine for what it does.

 We talk a lot on the list about people "getting it", but we rarely
outline what "it" is. We also dismiss other peoples work rather quickly
(unfairly I think), like Java, Pearl, C++, etc, but rarely for the right
reasons. To me "it" is pretty simple. Lisp and a few other languages
also have "it". "It" is life. Squeak has this completely different view
of the world from most other programming languages, and it even brings
its own house to live in. The world Squeak lives in is alive. Squeak
builds live objects. Squeak consists of live objects. Squeak is live
objects.

By contrast, most all other computer languages (and certainly all the
mainstream ones) build dead programs. The code base for these dead
programs are totally static, they cannot grow, cannot mutate, cannot
become more interesting as time progresses. Most, if not all, of the
data structures are dead. The tools that the cult of dead use for
propogation of their kind are usually centered around things like files
and file editors and post mortem debugging tools, and recently have been
swaddled in graphical interfaces giving the illusion of being living
dead. [As an aside, I recently showed a friend of mine the "versions" of
a method that I had coded, using the built in Squeak tools. This minor
part of Squeak brought a wide eye stare of astonishment from a high
priest of the cult of dead].

The cult of dead has borrowed some of the ideas of Smalltalk and used
them, such as "object oriented programming", garbage collection, and
virtual machines. However, this approach totally fails. It is the use of
these ideas used in unison with each other (the sum is mightier than its
parts) that brings life to the party. Each part alone is inanimate, and
helps to obfusticate the true underlying principals of a living system.
In some sense, it's like taking a nucleus or a mitochondria from a cell,
and placing it on a table without any of the cell machinery surrounding
it. From experience, I can tell you that they don't tend to flourish
under those circumstances. A cell without a nucleus isn't a very happy
camper either.

This is not to say that the cult of dead are not useful. Eventually when
you get down to it, the bits are the bits, and the dead are very good in
dealing with the bits. They are useful for writing a VM, or some type of
device interface if need be. Also, for many of the same reasons, to
think that Squeak is some modern day cure all for every computer problem
that comes along is rather misguided.

So when I hear talk about killing most parts of a Smalltalk environment
to produce a 20K FreeCell executable, it is very sad. You've basically
banished the FreeCell away from his family, and sent him to die in a
lonely corner of the world. The FreeCell should be among his friends,
where he can laugh and play and have a good time. Note that this is
different than having a slimmed down version of the image (which in my
mind should be built by some type of cross compilation process, rather
than amputating objects out of a living
image) for specific tasks. I also understand the need of task oriented
solutions, where the end user is locked out of the development
environment.

With that said, it's not contradictory to want a clickable file to
launch Squeak. One of the things that I like about Squeak is that I only
need four files, and I don't have to worry about the Windows registry
this, shared libraries that, execution paths and all of those other
nasty things. If it was one file, even better. I'll remind you that a
.EXE file is rather Windows centric, but conceptually that's probably
what you want to do.

With that information in mind, the reason I use Squeak is that I can
write even complex computer programs in a reasonable amount of time.
Using cult of dead tools, you are extremely limited to how much "dead
program" you can write or manage by yourself. In the living world, I can
take objects that are already alive and have them do my bidding. For
example, to start writing virtually any dead program from scratch you
have to figure out all the libraries and such that you will need to
perform even the simplest tasks. In Squeak, all I have to do is call my
minions by name and they are at my side, ready to roll. All of this
means that I can go through several itertations of implementation in the
same amount of time it takes a dead counterpart to go through one
iteration. I view Squeak as a personal multiplier of force, that is, it
projects my will over a broader path than I could by myself in a dead
program. You can take almost any one of the problems that you mentioned,
for example a database report writer, and actually have a chance of
building one yourself. I would estimate that it would take forever and a
day with cult of dead tools.

I agree with many of your points. Many of the UI paradigms that are
implemented on the host should be respected by Squeak. Simple things
like dialog windows should act like dialog windows, buttons should be
buttons, etc. At the same time, I think a lot of the core concepts of
Morphic are a great addition to the environment, and should be available
too. By providing a little bit of the interface sugar of the native UI,
we can inject the more important underlying concepts of the morph world,
which gives us leverage to build on. In other words, it's a trap. It
mostly looks and feels right, but we're not in Kansas anymore ;-) I
think one thing Alan Kay said was that Squeak should have a thousand
looks. I don't think one look in a certain context would be out of the
question.

I'll add that I think that the real way to make Squeak popular is to
produce 'killer apps' that play to Squeaks strengths. These apps give
the user a reason to invest the time, energy, and effort to learn
Squeak. Etoys is one such app, a "Super Hypercard" app, the Swiki is
another. I'm sure you can think of several by yourself. In general,
people want to solve some specific problem, or complete a task. Or be
introduced to an entirely new, powerful concept. Virtually all of the
different "killer" apps that you can think of, (text editor, word
processor, desktop publishing, photo editing, email,
etc.) are the compelling draws to use a computer. Indeed, machines have
been sold specifically just to run certain apps. That's why people buy
machines, to run apps. And they want to run the apps they want to run,
regardless of how off putting it may seem to people on this list. If you
make compelling content or apps, people will buy in.

I think you make a lot of good points, and appreciate your comments.

Jim

PS: Sorry, this got a little out of hand; I guess I felt more strongly
about this subject than I thought ;-)


> I'm really too new here to be speaking, but being a quite new user, I
> perhaps have a perspective on how Squeak looks to a new commer (i.e., 
> a potential convert)... 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.  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.)
>
> Squeak is a great environment for programmers.  It seems to be a lousy
> environment to turn end-users loose in.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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:
> Text Work, Database work, (a tiny bit of misc.)
> The users interact via interfaces, which must be predictable.
> Customization should be restricted to "power users", and even for them

> there needs to be an easy way to reset the interface to it's default 
> state.  So when they've confused themselves, they can recover.
>
> Where Text and Databases interface there need to be reports.  Printed
> reports.  With headers and footers, page numbers, dates, etc..  
> Sometimes tables of contents are important, though usually that's only

> for Word Processing documents.  But indicies are often imporant, and 
> they need to index by page number.
>
> Squeak should be an excellent environment for this, but it's missing
> features.  There isn't any obvious way to build these things (I told 
> you I was a newbie!).  I built a part of the Rolodex example, and now 
> I'm looking at it and saying to myself:  What's the best way to align 
> these boxes?  A grid mode would help this tremendously, but if it's 
> available I can't figure it out.
>
> Then I say:  If I were to want to print this out, what would the
> printout look like?  It wouldn't look like the data entry screen, so 
> having a basic association between the text field and the data is the 
> wrong organization.  There needs to be a database (even a flat file 
> would be better!) underneath this, and the entry form needs to be just

> one view of the data.  A report would be another.  Different views 
> could have different sorts, so perhaps an indexing system needs to be 
> a part of the view ...  etc. (This sounds like it might be MVC, but 
> the tutorials seem to ignore that option.)  Now how do I print it out 
> scrolling down the page 2 columns wide?
>
> Perhaps one of the other Smalltalks can handle this.  But the last
> time I checked into this (a couple of years ago) none of the ones that

> I could afford to evaluate could.  And most of them were tied to 
> Windows.  (The actual reason that I'm looking at Squeak is in hopes 
> that it could be an acceptable cross-platform development environment.

> I've also been looking at Ruby and Python, but they don't have very 
> good GUI environments.  [Fox works ok on Windows, but the Linux 
> version of FxRuby, e.g., never seems to work with the version of Fox 
> that got installed.].  And it's also difficult to create a packaged 
> program with them, though Python has some tools that make it possible 
> if not easy.)
>
> These don't seem to be intrinsic weaknesses.  In fact, they all look
> pretty elementary (if complicated).  But new users can't do anything 
> to fix them.  And can't even produce a toy application that's good 
> enough to show to the boss.  (The right-click halo alone is enough to 
> prevent
> that.)  So I may use Squeak at home, but until these are repaired (or
> until I know how to work around them) I'll never be able to use it in
my
> job.
>
>
>
>
>