On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Lily Smith wrote:

> I am new to SmallTalk. 

ACK! I feel my Linux Guru's syndrome flaring up! It must be the
misCapitalization of Smalltalk that triggers it!

Head for the hills!

[snip]
> The major reason that why SmallTalk is way less popular as Microsoft VB 
> is
> that SmallTalk lacks documentatation and a good tutorial.
[snip]

I'm always amazed at the number of economists with serious business
analysis training end up 1) taking intro programming courses in smalltalk,
2) happen to have lots of good figures wrt to the development tools
industry, and 3) are willing to give their authoritative judgement on how
to dominate said industry for free.

How *does* the Gartner Group stay in business?

[snip]
> those methods. Few documentation and examples on the web are available.
> After several setbacks like this, people will probably give up and 
> forget
> SmallTalk.

But you see, that's how we old, withered, embittered Smalltalkers learned
it, and instead of taking our hard won knowledge and donating days of our
lives writing documentation that people *still* complain about, we *much*
rather make everyone else suffer as we did. It's a competative advantage,
y'know.

> One of my assignments was to add a radio button group and then deal 
> with
> the user input. Even my teacher does not know how to implement a radio
> button group. He spent half an hour in class, trying to show us how to 
> add
> a radio button group. He failed. Then he wanted us to complete that
> assignment ourselves. God! It is even difficult for a SmallTalk senior 
> to
> find out something common!

Yes, it's reasonable to conclude that someone who didn't prepare for their
class and couldn't pull off a simple demo is a SmallTalk senior. I guess
that's why I'm not a MBA making the big bucks (or going to jail :)).

> How can SmallTalk be popular? Look at how 
> easy
> it is to add a radio button group in Microsoft VB!

Ok! I'll just hop over to MS's site and download VB for MacOSX...

...oops. I have to break into MS, grab the VB source code, port it to
MacOSX!?!?!? For a lousy radio button set!?

(I guess I could use RealBasic...see how its eclipsed VB in popularity!)

> Well, it is just my complaint on this language. I hope SmallTalk geeks
> should come up with a very good tutorial book for SmallTalk newbies.

See "Cash or Body Parts for Documentation" on the Squeak Swiki.

> Otherwise, it will never be popular.

Well, maybe not like VB, the "Most Popular to Hate" language known to
humandkind, but we might be popular like those also-ran languages like
Python.

Or maybe even just like Smalltalk, which has done pretty well for its
users.

(I do point to commercial Smalltalks, like Dolphin, or
VisualWorks. Dolphin is really a nice VB competator and a nice
Smalltalk. There's a pretty decent looking book for it, "The Dolphin
smalltalk Companion".)

Bijan "I'll never be the beloved of the masses" Parsia.