Squeak's "general acceptance"

Avi Bryant avi.bryant at gmail.com
Wed Jul 6 09:26:21 UTC 2005


On Jul 6, 2005, at 3:55 AM, Blake wrote:
>>
>> It's also great, IMNSHO, for doing professional web development -  
>> there are a few of us around whose companies are built around  
>> exactly that.
>>
>
> Using Seaside, you mean? I wonder how many of those few were new to  
> Squeak when they decided to do that.

Of those I know?  All of them.  Including me.  Not, obviously, that  
any of us decided to build our businesses around Squeak before using  
it for a while, but all of us started using (or writing ;) Seaside  
while new to Squeak and never looked back.

I'm not trying to make any particular point here, just offering  
information since you asked.

>> But personally, I don't think Squeak (or Smalltalk) ever will be  
>> "generally accepted" in the kind of sense you mean, and, yes, I'm  
>> fine with that.

> I don't care if Squeak is "generally accepted" in the kind of sense  
> you impute to me, either. I do find it odd, though, to be  
> disdainful of acquiring a larger audience and particularly to turn  
> one's nose up at the suggestion of improvements to interoperability.

Am I turning my nose up?  I'm sorry, I genuinely didn't mean to be.   
Just because I don't think Squeak will ever have the mass-market  
appeal of Delphi certainly doesn't meant we shouldn't try to address  
individual concerns.  And I'm hardly uninterested in the issue of  
connecting to relational databases - I've written, for Squeak,  
several tools for object/relational mapping (the most interesting of  
which is probably ROE), a binding for SQLite, a simple bridge to let  
you use JDBC drivers, etc.  I actually don't think Squeak's database  
access story is that bad (at least from my web developer's biased  
view), but it could certainly be improved.

So, let's focus on the actual concerns you brought up:
- it sounds like you were having trouble installing the ODBC  
package.  It actually works fine for me; can anyone else reproduce  
the issue?
- there's no good data grid; definitely a problem, but one several  
people have mentioned they're working on.
- anything else?

Cheers,
Avi





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