Hi!

"leftie2100" <leftie2100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Goran,
> 
> I didn't necessarily mean that you in particular were guilty of
> anything mentioned in particular. More that the general atmosphere and
> attitude indicated what I was describing. Sorry if it came across
> differently.

No problem. :) But I disagree about the "general atmosphere". Just the
fact that this issue is being discussed a LOT on this list tells me that
the community cares. It is just that these things are *hard*. Squeak is
evolving at a fast pace and a successful effort in this area really
*must* handle the problem with stuff going stale.

If you want to do a difference in this area I think there are many
others listening. But I have seen so many efforts start out, work
furiously, fade away... Don't repeat that mistake. We must learn from
these earlier failures and come up with something that *scales*. The
Magic Book idea is *one* idea that I formulated that I felt could have
some chance of success. SM is also an enabler in this area.

In fact - we can easily register other things in SM than packages. That
was the idea from the start at least. On the other hand we already have
a rather good meta-place - the Squeak Swiki. It wouldn't be good to have
those two mechanisms fighting each other.

> While you yourself may not wish to be a Squeak "evangelist," many do,
> and they wonder why lots of people don't simply immediately understand
> Squeak is great and just start using it. Well, people (especially

Indeed. :-) No, seriously - Squeak/Smalltalk is great but I agree that
it is hard to get into it quickly. And we can always do better in that
department. On the other hand I think that one of the free books (see
below) will get you into it quickly enough.

But this problem is not only because lacking or rather perhaps
"dispersed" documentation but also because Smalltalk is rather different
to many other things out there.

> newbies) need to have their hand held and be nursed through the
> process of starting to something new. One cannot act like a tech snob
> toward those who are less knowledgeable than themselves and still have
> a chance at converting new users. Having some tutorials scattered all

I promise that there are no tech snobs here. Really. But I agree with
that of course.

> over the net that people may or may not find in the right order to
> properly learn the language is not a system that is conductive to
> learning. There needs to be a centralized place where people find the
> files they need, as well as a downloadable text/s specifically
> directed toward the current release that introduces Squeak and carries
> the new user to a minimum level of competancy.

Yes, I agree with these goals. It is just that... it is not so easy to
accomplish. :-)

And believe me (not sure how long you have been here) when I say that
this list is one of the friendliest lists that... Well, friendliest
period. :-) Newbies are very welcome, and if you read the archives etc
you can see that newbie questions are almost always answered abundantly.
And hopefully newbies feel that the community is in fact trying hard to
hold hands.

One "issue" with Squeak is that Squeak is a Smalltalk. In fact, it is a
direct descendant of Smalltalk-80. This means that all the stuff out
there covering Smalltalk more or less applies to Squeak too. This is
similar to say Lisp. There is no One Single Place for learning Lisp
either. Because there are numerous Lisp implementations and communities.
So it may seem as confusing as Squeak I think.

Finally - personally I would recommend one of the free books as a
starter. These are professionally written books available as PDFs that
cover Smalltalk in full detail. There can hardly be a better way to
start with Smalltalk/Squeak IMHO. Here is the url again:

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html

And frankly - how many other programming languages out there have such a
wealth of *free good books* available as pdfs?

regards, Göran