Squeak practical use?

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Mon Jan 28 15:53:17 UTC 2002


On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Yoel Jacobsen wrote:

>     So, the inquiry - Are you using Squeak for any practical use? Please
> tell me only about resource intensive applications (currency conversion
> does not count as a practical application).

I'm not sure if this is resource intensive enough, but in the case it is:
I am an undergrad, and am involved in some ecology research.  As a part of
this research, I did a little HTML generation/stats on the datasets
( http://beaver.nrri.umn.edu/beav_public/datalist/ ) as well as an app
used to browse and visualize these datasets and output graphs.  It was my
first Morphic application, but it went surprisingly well for having pretty
weak docs.

Not having made a switch from another language like C/GTK+ or Java/Swing
to conduct this kind of work, I can't make any comparisons as to how fast
I produced a sufficiently working app- but the biologists under which I am
working were impressed with it.  I had the original application done after
a couple weeks (maybe less, didn't keep track), and that was mostly
learning Morphic.  After that, it was developing plug-ins to visualize
different data in different ways, everything from species vs. species
phase plots with color to indicate time, to simple time series with N/Am
levels.

In addition to this, I use Squeak in the same way you seem to use Python.
For me, if I need to write a small script to do some data munging of a
dataset or any other smallish task that would be better automated, I'll
use Squeak.  For me, I do so because it's the most natural means to that
end.  Sure, a 3 line perl script may do the same thing as 10 line
Squeak script, but it takes me a lot less time to write.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
"the only difference it makes if some dust on the clay"  :: atmosphere






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