Tim Rowledge wrote on Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:36:01 -0800
> What do you use Squeak for?

I am using Celeste in Squeak to reply to this email.

Many of my presentations have used Squeak.

Squeak is a key technology in my projects (the SiliconSqueak processor)
including for most of my simulations

Since I always have a window open with Squeak for email, I often use it
as a calculator for more complicated things (I use an actual calculator
for simple things and LibreOffice spreadsheets for really complicated
things).

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

I like many languages including other Smalltalks. Though I am very
interested in Cuis I never used it because some of the things that were
ripped out were stuff I used in my presentations. Once I had a short
deadline for a presentation and downloaded the latest Squeak on a new
laptop but found that thumbnails had been broken. The fix was trivial,
but I ended up doing the presentation in Prezi since I couldn't risk
running into more problems. More recently stupid OS security
restrictions in running Squeak off a USB pen drive have made me do
presentations in PDF instead.

But the truth is that Self is my favorite Smalltalk for technical
reasons and the Squeak community is the reason for me using that. And
one aspect of that community for a long time was the leadership of the
PARC people - very much like a reunion of the favorite band from your
childhood. That put Squeak along with VisualWorks in a special place
among all Smalltalks and we lost a bit of that after Squeak 3.2. The
split with Pharo and Cuis certainly changed the community somewhat, but
I think this was a good opportunity for Squeak to be more strongly
commited to Etoys, which took a long while but eventually has mostly
happened.

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

Modularity needs to be improved. It should be possible to start really
small and as transparently as possible use anything out there. Right now
we start big and have too much trouble loading extra stuff. And given
that we don't have computers with just a few MB of RAM anymore it is
silly to have to manage separate .source and .changes files. I think
these two issues are related.

> What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Obviously writing class comments?

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

Run stuff like Frank, Croquet and so on all at the same time instead of
as separate images.

-- Jecel