A squeak3.4 VM will be needed

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Fri Jan 17 02:42:05 UTC 2003


On Thursday 16 January 2003 05:45 pm, Ralf Bokelberg wrote:
> I am a newbie to squeak and smalltalk
> but i'm not a newbie to programming.
>
> I just started to discover squeak and i don't
> consider the main problem to be not having
> version .x  but
>
> 1. installing external programs. I just managed to install
> the sm browser, but it really was a mess to do. Imho somebody
> has to write a simple step by step howTo)

We hope that we've made it somewhat easier in 3.4. Perhaps we need to 
make a big friendly button somewhere that says "Open a SqueakMap 
Browser!". There is an entry in 3.4's World/Open menu that opens a 
SqueakMap loader (loading SqueakMap if necessary).

The menus (even/especially the World menu) are complicated and large; 
expecting a newbie to discover anything in them (and remember what 
was discovered) is probably unreasonable.

> 2. the lack of good examples of productive
> or inspiring work, which was made with squeak

We have SqueakMap for that. Though when a package gets installed, it 
can be pretty difficult to spot. Objects can get created by the 
installation code; multiple change sets can be loaded; objects can be 
loaded from projects, etc.

Were you looking for the artifacts themselves (the work) or were you 
looking for an explanation of how the work was created? The former is 
easier to find than the latter.

There are actually a number of good (but hard to find) examples of 
entire applications, libraries, etc. shipped with Squeak. But it's 
not easy to see what comprises them if you're new to Squeak (or, 
sometimes, if you're not the author).

> 3. probably problem 2 comes from the fact, that
> inspiring code is totally hidden by the vast of code
> of the whole machine.

Yes.

> As i'm a newbie, i'm probably missing the whole point,
> but the entry barrier seems to be pretty high to me.

It depends on what you're trying to get done. As a full-featured 
development environment, it's not too much more difficult to get 
something done (I think) than in other development environments.

Yes, we lack "wizards" for common tasks; this is partly because we 
don't have any real idea what common tasks Squeak is applied to.

It's not like Squeak's been targeted as a development environment for 
enterprise database front ends, like some other Smalltalks have been.

Part of the barrier you mention is probably due to the fact that 
there's just *so much* shipped with Squeak. We're trying to help this 
situation by making it easy to maintain significant applications and 
libraries as loadable packages.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE




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