[squeak-dev] Why would you choose Squeak today?

Levente Uzonyi leves at elte.hu
Mon Sep 24 12:25:04 UTC 2012


On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:

>
> No flame war intended. Maybe this topic has been discussed on this list, but 
> I've never found a satisfactory conclusion. With "today" I mean why to start 
> a software project *from scratch* with Squeak?
>
> My usage today is to load and try packages which only works under Squeak. 
> Yours may be different, so it would be nice to know what squeak developers 
> think about.
>
> What thing does have Squeak that others doesn't?
> Why would you choose Squeak over Pharo or Cincom Smalltalk?

Here's a list of advantages which are unique to Squeak according to my 
knowledge:

Fully transparent developement process. You can easily find the answer to 
the question: Who changed, what, when and why?.

Great update process. You just press a button and your image will have
the latest updates. Since it uses Monticello only, therefore you can 
do changes in your image and the updates will still work. And you can do 
it starting from Squeak 3.10.2 (with a few glitches though, but IIRC the 
whole process only requires human interaction 3 times and most of these 
involve only pressing a button). All releases are product of the update 
process, no manual tweaking is/was necessary.

The update process only moves forward. The devs don't push stuff just to 
see if it will break or not, and roll back if they find it breaks.

Care about backwards compatibility. It's pretty unlikely that you have to 
make lots of effort to make your code work in the next release. You can 
see plenty of changes to the system, but the APIs rarely change.

No paid developers. This is a double-edged sword, because developement is 
obviously slower this way, but the project already proved that it can move 
forward without money.


Levente

>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hernán
>
>


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