Squeak UI and toolkit commentary: (was: Re: Who has no job? ( was Re: O\'Reilly Squeak book?))
Doug Way
dway at riskmetrics.com
Mon Apr 29 04:41:13 UTC 2002
Aaron J Reichow wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, [ISO-8859-1] G=F6ran Hultgren wrote:
>
>>Yes you are quite correct Martin. Currently I consider Squeak to be an
>>excellent \"car construction toolkit\" but a pretty lousy \"car\".
>
> I don't doubt that we mechanics have different expectations in a computing
> system, but for me, Squeak makes a great car. If I only had a better web
> browser in Squeak, I'd spend 99% of my time in it. Squeak is the kind of
> environment I'd want even if I weren't so enthusiastic about the Smalltalk
> language itself. I'm the kind of person who would've wanted to use a
> LispMachine, or one of those people who live out of emacs.
I tend to agree more with Göran that the car itself is not currently as
impressive as the car construction toolkit. It certainly has the
potential to become a great car, though. It sounds like you like the
Squeak car partly because it includes an excellent construction toolkit,
and also because there's not a huge chasm between the car and the
construction toolkit. (this metaphor is falling apart a bit... :) )
Also I think part of Göran's point was that you can potentially improve
Squeak more by attracting developers rather than end-users, since the
developers will be able to work on Squeak. (Although with Squeak there
is sort of a continuum from developer to end-user.)
> ...
> One of the reasons I love Squeak is that I can do that if I want. And
> because *I* can make those changes, I'm self-sufficient and -sustaining,
> in charge of my own destiny. While that's one of the goals of the
> primarily C-based "open source" movement, there's a gigantic amount of
> overhead involved with making changes to a system written in such a
> language. You have to know so much more. And there are so many special
> cases. You have to find the tools that help you to find where to make
> these changes. Temporal, equipment and mental overhead. If I wanted to
> change something about the way my X11 window manager worked, I'd have to
> do a lot more work than to make a similar change in Squeak.
This is absolutely true, though, and this point can get lost by casual
users/developers.
- Doug Way
dway at riskmetrics.com
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