[Squeakland] Squeak first impressions and a couple questions

[Jeff]

Hello all! :)

I'm a squeak newbie and pretty much a newbie to programming as a whole. I've explored a little bit of a variety of languages, but never really got serious about any of them because I always had the impression that I would have to invest a great deal of time and effort into studying them before I could use them to do anything useful. This is an unfortunate thing for someone who really does want to, (and sometimes "needs" to), do some programming. Additionally, the languages I've looked at have always given me the impression that even after learning them creating simple programs from them would be a very time consuming process. This might be fine for people who want to BE PROGRAMMERS, but what I want is to HAVE WORKING PROGRAMS. (Bold there is for emphasis, I'm really not shouting at you all :)

So anyway, after exploring and doing short tutorials in a lot of languages, (c, C++, perl, ruby, java, php, Visual Basic, Basic), I finally found squeak. This is the first one that I've really liked at first glance. Why, you ask? Well, the first thing I loved about it was that I was able to make a race car move around the screen very quickly and now I know how to do it again in under 5 minutes if I want to. But after I got over how cool that is and did a little more sober reflection, (as well as searching the web to find out what all there is to squeak), I started to appreciate it even more. For one thing I don't know of any other language in which you can modify an active script during runtime. Secondly morphic programming seems very cool. I haven't fully got the hang of it yet, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. Third, I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the tools that have been included in squeak, such as the painting program and wonderland. I'm also happy 
to see the projects that are in the works, and I look forward to using completed version of croquet and squeakNOS in the future. 

On the downside, as I think others mention a lot I'd like to see more and better documentation. Most of the tutorials I've found on the web I have been unable to make work, and I believe it is because they were written using an earlier version of squeak. Also the pages I've opened with Scamper aren't being rendered properly. The only other real downside I see at the moment is that some of the projects I wish were complete aren't finished yet. Actually there is one other one, and that's that it, (or the "e-toys" part of it? I'm not sure exactly what the definition of etoys even is yet, is that just whatever you make with the prepackaged morphs?), appears to be marketed as if it were just for kids. I don't know why that's the case. Comparing making the race car in squeak, (e-toys?) versus doing so in another language reminds me of comparing running a computer on DOS versus running one with an OS that uses a GUI. These easy to conceptualize and use drag-and-drop, point-and-click 
interfaces might be arguably childish, but I don't know too many adults running DOS machines right now.

After having played around with squeak for about a week, I do have a few questions, if anyone would be kind enough to answer them.

1. When creating a new morph, how do you get it to appear in the flaps registry?, ( I managed to successfully create a read only text morph by copying the textmorph class and removing the HandlesKeystroke method, but I don't know how to get it into the supplies flap. )

2. I figured out how to get my race car to react to keystrokes, but I'd like to get it to react to keys that are still down. In other words, when I keep holding the up arrow after hitting the left arrow, I want it to continue accelerating without me needing to hit the up arrow again. Is there a way to script "KeyBeingHeldDown" or something like that?

3. While playing around with text entries, I managed to get scripts to fire based on the text's last character... unless that character is the enter key. I tried <cr> for carriage return, and other variations to represent that, to no avail. How can I start a script from a person hitting enter after typing a command in the text field?

4. I did see an older version of squeak that used a buttonbar in which morphs could be placed on little squeak logos which would then act as creators of those morphs. Was that removed, and if so why?

5. Are there any plans to make some standard morphs for widgets such as those which come with Glade or WXWidgets? I know about WXSqueak, but I'm wondering if there are plans to make those kinds of windows, listboxes, etc. as morphs, so that I can create and manipulate them in the same way I do with all the other morphs. I understand that it's unlikely that such morphs would look "native", but I believe that is an overrated concern. Whether the aesthetics match my windows theme, Mac, Unix, etc. defaults is not concerning to me. I just want them to function in the same way.

6. On that same note, any good tutorials for WXSqueak that work with Squeak 3.8? (I did manage to get it installed through squeakmap, and the system browser shows a lot of WXwidgets packages, classes, etc. so I believe I did it right, but I have no idea how to use it.)

7. Also, is there a tutorial for Seaside that works with Squeak 3.8?

Thanks!,
Julio :)



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