What I'd love to see in Squeak

jim jigme1968 at tom.com
Fri Feb 6 09:26:13 UTC 2004


To be honest, the only thing that's good in Python is that it's GPL licensed 
and with comparely better Documents and tutorials. For a better "feeling" I 
would prefer Ruby.

I've noticed since the day I started to learn Smalltalk that a lot of people 
feel it difficult to accept the syntax style of it. Well people differ. I'm a 
Chinese and I've never find a better language syntax than Smalltalk's. 
Perhaps it's the way we thinking makes the difference. I personaly strongly 
dislike the C style codes. They break my thoughts into pieces as a mess.

What prevents me from learning Squeak(but not other dialects) is its lack of 
tutorials. Though I understand why, it's really troublesome.
It seems to me that Squeak, while be rightly careful in developing the masses 
of user, would be benefited from a relatively bigger (than as current) 
intermediate-leveled users community. While developing their skills in Squeak 
they would contribute to documents that we tell newer ones what they have 
learnt to do in Squeak. This will not do any harm to Squeak which itself 
should be kept active and changing in many aspects. 

Another thing I really want to see in Squeak is Unicode supporting since it's 
really sad to see others enjoy the happy of etoys while we can't do much here 
to let Chinese boys and girls get into this land.

Finally I'd send my admires to all people who bring to the world with this 
creative and interesting Squeak. 



On Monday 02 February 2004 05:55, Daniel Joyce wrote:
> 	Well, Python has several things I like....
>
> 	1) Sane library/import systems. Sane namespaces.
> 	2) The ability to code extensions in C, and hook them into Python, and
> have them appear as other Pythonic Object. When PyPy comes out, with it's
> dynamic recomplier, and written in itself, it will have what Squeak has
> been promising for 5 years. Squeak is written in itself, yes, but the new
> Jitter has gone through 4-5 aborted stalled attempts.
> 	3) It has no wonderous GUI. But I can choose to use it, or loose it. IDLE
> is very nice, and there is no reason why one couldn't write a ST like
> environment on top of python. With Python's syntax, it'd be very easy to
> make it support both 'self' and 'smalltalk' behaviors. The object model is
> infinitely flexible. Python's sound support WORKS, unlike Squeak on Linux
> which to break in different ways at different times.
> 	4) Python supports a wide variety of 3rd party tools and libraries.
> TwistedMatrix alone is a networking library that Squeak, or any language
> would kill to have. Very well written, very, excedingly easy to use.





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