[Squeakland] Squeak vs. Python for this task on hand...

[Andreas Raab]

Hi Jeffrey,

Much can be said for and against each system but it appears to me that this
discussion would be better taken care of on the general Squeak developers
mailing list. There are lots of people with varying backgrounds on it and
I'm sure several of them will be able to give you good advise on these
issues. For finding out more about the Squeak developers mailing list see:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/listinfo/squeak-dev

See you there ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org 
> [mailto:squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey McGrew
> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 7:11 PM
> To: squeakland at squeakland.org
> Subject: [Squeakland] Squeak vs. Python for this task on hand...
> 
> 
> Hello all,
> 
>     I'm an Architect here in the S.F. Bay Area who has in 
> mind a few programs I
> would like to create. However, I haven't done any programming 
> in a very long
> time, and am pretty much starting from scratch.
> 
>     The programs I want to create pretty much fall into two 
> different camps,
> one is taking plaintext & ODBC output from a CAD program 
> (AutoDesk Revit)
> and doing various things to it, like parsing it to generate 
> other documents, and the
> other is making some tools to issue commands to and generate 
> plaintext files for
> Radiance, a command-line *nix rendering tool.
> 
>     I've been playing around with Squeak, and love how 
> elegant and easy to learn
> it is. However I'm concerned, for most of what I want to do 
> is not so UI-orientated,
> but more little auto-utilities and/or scripts, that will 
> possibly become command-line
> utilities. The intent is for these to become stand-alone 
> tools that people could use
> alongside of their CAD software. As such, I'm worried that 
> Squeak's 'all-in-one'
> image approach might not be the right way to approach 
> generating these tools,
> for I don't understand how one would make a stand-alone 
> application using
> Squeak. I also don't know how well Squeak deals with 
> plaintext and ODBC
> files that live outside of it's image. This is totally due to 
> my general lack of
> knowledge, and has nothing to do with any lacking in Squeak. :)
> 
> So my other thought is to learn Python; however the Architect 
> part of me
> just loves Squeak, loves everything being OO and everything 
> being able to
> be taken apart and modified on the fly- and the beginning programmer
> part loves how much is taken care of for me 'behind the 
> scenes' leaving
> me to focus on the task at hand. However not understanding Squeak, and
> seeing that Python is already used by people to do similar 
> tasks as the
> ones I'm thinking of, it makes me feel split between the two.
> 
> I see that there are such things as webservers and wikis that run
> within Squeak, do these run 'headless' or something? Can someone
> more knowledgeable chime in and talk about Squeaks ability to parse
> and modify exterior data?
> 
> Thanks all for your time,
> 
> Jeffrey McGrew
> Designer
> Huntsman Architectural Group
> 50 California Street, Seventh Floor
> San Francisco, CA 94111
> Phone: (415) 394-1212
> Fax: (415) 394-1222
> Cell: (415) 505-4689 
> 
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