[squeak-dev] Survey: what do you do with Squeak, what do you *want* to do?

kaveman v.krishnakumar at gmail.com
Thu Mar 1 09:24:49 UTC 2018


Hello all,

> Please, whether you're a frequent user or an occasional look-at-the-list
> type, take a moment to let us know your opinions.

Long time lurker here and first time poster so go easy on me :)

> What do you use Squeak for?

I did use Squeak for a seaside web app in production for 15 months before it
was replaced with a PHP implementation. I no longer use Smalltalk at work.

> If you don't use Squeak, why not?
> If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?

It's hard to evangelise Smalltalk to an average developer who just wants to
get things done. (Enterprise) managers are people who are difficult to
reason with IME. Even for me, it didn't click until I read the first two
chapters of "A Mentoring Course on Smalltalk". That brilliant mind-expanding
book also spoiled it for me. Most smalltalk code looks rubbish now...like
assembler inside objects and blocks. 

There are also practical things like change management, deployment etc. Fact
is the popular languages have at least caught up if not exceeded in terms of
ecosystem and tooling.

> What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for 'regular'
> development?

In 2018, the smalltalk-is-its-own-isolated-world view is just wrong.

> What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Replacing the low level layers of the system. Eg: integrate the native high
performance event system of the host operating system. 10-30% CPU usage even
when idling is not acceptable when running on the cloud.

> What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?

I'm dealing with a bunch of "knowledge management" problems and would like
to use Squeak to build prototypes leveraging some good stuff like magma for
example.

There is also the experiment that I started sometime ago but never found
time to work on: a standalone magma server that runs directly on the
hypervisor using a rumpkernelized squeak.

Cheers,
  --krishna

p.s: this is all from memory and I did not fact-check so it could very well
be that the complaints are no longer valid in which case I'm happy to be
corrected.



--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Dev-f45488.html


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