The leaders (was Re: Smalltalk and Self)

Jonathan Kelly jonkelly at fastmail.fm
Sun Sep 4 06:33:48 UTC 2005


Hi List,


Victor Rodriguez wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2005/9/3, Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com>:
> 
>>On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 22:26:23 -0700, Victor Rodriguez
>><victor.palique at gmail.com> wrote:
>>[stuff about Squeak's accessibility]
>>
>>I'm not going to disagree with you, exactly, because I think your
>>perceptions are mostly correct. Although, I would say that light fooling
>>around in Squeak is pretty easy. There are lots of beginner's documents,
>>there is Etoys, etc. Making the jump from apprentice to master--or even
>>Journeyman, for that matter, is much, much harder. Squeak is a lot of big
>>bites (even Etoys is a big bite if you hope to understand the system in
>>the Smalltalk sense). I have actually found this to be true of Smalltalk
>>since I started with it (over ten years ago!).
> 
> 
> I put it to you that it is actually not that easy to get started with
> Squeak. Yes, there are lot's of beginner's tutorials, but nothing
> cohesive, some effort is required to sort things out. And let's not
> understime the shock of the first encounter with Squeak: its UI is
> *nothing* like what most comers from other languages  are used to.
> This, and the garish colors it used to use, was what turned me away
> twice. I just couldn't make sense of it. Now, this might just be me,
> but I suspect it's not.
>  

I can back you up there. I've been looking at smalltalk for a new 
project, completely redeveloping a legacy character mode database 
application, and I can tell you, Squeak is not the place to learn 
Smalltalk, at least for me, who is a bit of a control freak, I must 
admit. There's just way to much stuff to deal with. Sure I should be 
able to just leave all that other stuff in the image that I'm not using, 
and use what I need, but somehow I just can't. I did scour the web and 
wiki and found the, make Squeak smaller info, and I tried some of it, 
and the image actually got larger. That's not right! hehe

I'm not quite understanding at this stage (and that is a VERY newbie 
state), if Smalltalk is so wonderful, why does it appear so difficult to 
clean up an image and only have what you want. I am starting to 
understand that Smalltalk is different, and almost organic, and can 
conjecture that things can become interdependent real quick without you 
noticing, but still it shouldn't be a requirement.

If there is no reason that I currently don't understand why squeak 
couldn't be pared back, I'm willing to give it a go, but I'll need 
pointers. I can't think of a better way to learn how it all fits 
together. I have some ideas from my research so far, but the the whole 
image thing, if not completely "black" box, is still quite dark grey!

If someone is willing to mentor me on what I need to know to try to 
clean up an image, I'm willing to learn, and put in the work, and to 
document the process somehow and give that back to the community. I'm 
sure that would make a good resourse for new comers to understand how it 
all fits together, and might attract more control freaks like me, if 
they knew how to get a tidy, manageable squeak image. :)

Please don't take this as any sort of criticism of squeak, or the people 
working on it; just the impressions of someone trying to learn 
smalltalk. I'm *very* excited by the promise of smalltalk, and I can see 
that Squeak is very "cool" (yes I am a geek). :)

While I'm in feedback mode, I will concur with the person who commented 
on the wiki being out of date: that is a definite discouragement to 
looking further. When the "where are we going" is 5 years old, one 
wonders where they got lost, or when they lost interest. I understand 
there is a new website on the go, so if attracting people to squeak is 
important, I'd say move that one up the list of priorities a bit.

Jonathan.



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