I beg to differ, I think Jan's outlook is interesting - the fact that we
use certain representations because they are useful for a purpose, and
easy to program around, shouldn't stop us from remembering the primitive
stuff we're actually reasoning about, and considering different
representations to work with. 

MathMorphs are something every Smalltalker should try, if only to remind
himself a workspace and browser are by no means the only way to work.

I didn't understand Jan to mean that we misinterpret Squeak objects
because we work with textual representations, just asking what more
direct ways there are. Or maybe differently direct is a better way to
put it, because at the end it is mostly shown as pixels, whatever the
metaphor.

Daniel

Aaron J Reichow <reic0024 at d.umn.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2003, Jon Hylands wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 23 May 2003 03:34:00 +0200, "jan ziak" <ziakjan at host.sk> wrote:
> >
> > > ...certainly, and therefore it is a problem from my viewpoint also. we do not
> > > work with objects, but text in most cases - but i would like to work with
> > > objects.
> >
> > Maybe you should take up woodworking then...
> 
> Haha, indeed!
> 
> It's a good thing everyone in the world doesn't have the same skewed
> outlook as Jan- or else we'd be doing almost nothing other than working
> with spoken language and text. After all, that is how we communicate with
> the majority of our systems- spoken language with people and other
> animals, and text with most of our computers.  I may be a psychiatrist
> who saves lives all the time- but I'm not working with people, their
> minds, and their lives, I'm just talking and hearing other words which
> incidentally are being talked at the same time.
> 
> Regards,
> Aaron
> 
>   Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
>   "if i don't stay true to live and hate, how do i differentiate
>               between chasing cream and chasing dreams"  :: atmosphere