On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Lawson English <lenglish5@cox.net> wrote:

waufrepi III wrote:

Hi,
I was talking to one of my Professors about Squeak the other day and I got an mail asking:
"I had lunch with several of the other CS faculty yesterday and I brought up your enthusiasm for smalltalk, which I've never used. Some of the faculty panned it because they claimed the I/O features were either poor or nonexistent. [Java will never be displaced as the first language at ............] What is your impression of the I/O abilities of smalltalk? There is much discussion about the need to learn a language with OOP features before Java.

I'm still a novice and I actually haven't been able to play with squeak much lately do to other classwork..so rather than blow an opportunity for squeak I thought I'd ask here and see what the pros say.
wfpi

I'm a squeak beginner myself. I can tell you from experience that squeak is a contradictory conglomeration of wonderful features and lame implementations that may or may not make it suitable for teaching a given intro-to-OOP class. Can you point us to class notes from previous classes from the same institution where Java or C# or C++ or Python was used? It is entirely possible that Squeak doesn't have good coverage of the facilities (other than OOP itself) that are expected from a modern language for that particular class. It is also entirely possible that the professors don't know what they are talking about.

Without more information, it's all conjecture.

Lawson

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