Dear All,
Imagine that you bought an iPhone 20 years ago. Over the years, you have 
filled it with pictures, contacts, and other personal data. You now want 
to upgrade to iPhone SE and find that all your personal data are lost 
because there is no way to transfer your data. Very sad.

The same has happened to me with Squeak. The Squeak programs I have 
written over the past 20 years are effectively lost because I can’t port 
them to a current version of Squeak. Very sad.

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate to achieve 
a goal. I retired 20 years ago and made it my task to create DCI 
(Data-Context-Interaction), a programming paradigm that merges the 
concepts of class and collaboration. BabyIDE is a non-intrusive Squeak 
program that includes a model of DCI as well as tools for programming 
within the paradigm. BabyIDE is a kind of Dynabook, a personal computer 
for experts in all domains. Its target group could be department 
managers in business and industry; they are experts in running their 
department in collaboration with other managers. Another target group 
could be farmers; they are experts in taking care of their animals. A 
third target group could be homeowners; they build expertise in 
controlling their smart home.

Squeak is more than a programming language; it is a live universe of 
collaborating objects. The shared objects on the web is also a universe 
of collaborating objects that Kevin Kelly called a /single, global 
machine/. BabyIDE extends the Squeak image into this global machine, 
making all the combined objects available for personal programming as 
illustrated below:



BabyIDE is now running in Squeak 3.10.2, together with a new Squeak 
Reverse Engineering tool. I want to port my programs to Squeak 3.5 to 
benefit from its improved internet communication facilities. This port 
has been pestering me since April, but the overwhelming complexity of 
3.5 has forced me to accept defeat. I can’t avoid speculating about the 
nature of Squeak’s current target group. It used to be “children of all 
ages.” Today, it neither includes children nor old Smalltalk hands like 
me (I wrote my first Smalltalk program in 1978). Stephen Pope, another 
veteran who also bemoans what is happening to Squeak, wrote in a blog:

    /“//The most popular systems (Squeak and Pharo) both suffer from
    unbelievable image bloat, with many thousands of classes, hundreds
    of root classes, class hierarchies with many instance variables in
    the high-level (abstract) classes, and too many packages with cute
    but meaningless (to a new-comer) names.”/
    https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/08/10/smalltalks-successor/

I couldn’t agree more. A few examples:

    1.Class Object defines 485 methods. This means that every Squeak
    object understands at least 485 messages. Most of them are
    irrelevant to the problem at hand, but all of them can be part of
    unexpected behavior.

    2.The state of every Morph object is held in its regular instance
    variables PLUS any number of undeclared and undocumented variables
    in its /extension/, a Dictionary that may include another dictionary
    inside it. The Morph class comment: /“MorphExtension Allows extra
    properties to be stored without adding a storage burden to all
    morphs.”/ I’m more concerned about the burden put upon the code reader.

    3.For me, the final straw was the new filtering phase added to
    Squeak’s already complex event handling mechanism. Squeak 3.5 has
    208 new methods with ‘filter’ in their name, but there is no
    indication as to what they are for and when to use them. The
    abstract concepts of event filtering are documented, but there is no
    documentation on their reification into concrete code. The
    complexity of a basically simple mechanism has reached a new high
    far beyond the capabilities of my brain.

    4.Class MorphicEventDispatcher has 4 methods in 3.10.2 and 16
    methods in 5.3.

    5.Class /MyMorph>> processEvent: anEvent using: anIgnoredDispatcher/
    is a regular event handler in 3.10.2. In 5.3, it is a filter, and
    its execution never stops.


After 60 years in programming, 42 of them in Smalltalk, and the last 20 
in Squeak, I have reached the end of my patience and reluctantly have to 
quit Squeak programming. It is truly a sad day.

Have fun and Goodbye,
--Trygve

-- 

/The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborateto achieve 
a goal. /
Trygve Reenskaug mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no <mailto:%20trygver at ifi.uio.no>
Morgedalsvn. 5A http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 468 58 625

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