Dave,
You can dismiss it as my own personal mid-life crisis if you like. But as you have offered your suggestions for reprogramming my personal point of view, let me offer some for yours.
What about the 99.99% of people on the
planet who are not application developers?
I see all people as application developers in the wetware of their own minds and hearts. They all need but not all want help to program themselves to perfection which can unlock miracles that Jesus Christ's gospel speaks of.
Although I consider myself world class in Bible analysis, I find nobody cares. So as my time on the planet is limited, I'm using Squeak to build an Artificial Intelligence to encapsulate my level of understanding so children in the future can learn to meet and exceed my skills, which may help end world hunger, poverty, illiteracy,, crime, terrorism, and war.
I think part of that vision is what motivated Alan Kay to pour himself into trying to make the world's kids become programmers through EToys and others similarly with Scratch.
To me that is what makes Squeak special. It is a tool for thinking and
learning, and it is accessible at people with all sorts of interests and ideas. It is not just for programmers and application developers.
Often I must fight my imperfect dreams and pray for the perfect. In this case I suggest analyzing your statement until you understand the oxymoron. I can write a one word text file that is accessible to all sorts of people but so what? What matters is what Squeak can do for me and others who download it. With the 2-3 button mouse preference error Squeak is no better than a screen saver image to the majority even if Squeak is otherwise so good it should have been the first computer language instead of Fortran and thousands of other languages should never have been invented. In the 5 computer stores I frequent, I can't recall seeing a laptop with a 3 button mouse. You are asking me and 99.99% of the world to think so highly of Squeak even in its dysfunctional state that they worship it like the people did in the story of the emperor with no clothes.
It's just that to me, it would be really discouraging if Squeak got
turned into a "development tool", and disappointing if people did not see its role as something more than just another programming language.
If it is not a superior development tool then it is just another programming language but only when it works. The lack of development in Smalltalk is why it is dying like human languages such as Esperanto or Latin. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsSmalltalkDead If Squeak gets used in more viral applications then people will get more interested in learning it.
Kirk Fraser
On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 10:38 AM, David T. Lewis lewis@mail.msen.com wrote:
On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 12:02:52PM -0700, Kirk Fraser wrote:
Byte magazine which published the balloon concept for Smalltalk rising above the ivory tower of a lighthouse guiding the way in a sea of
computer
languages is out of business. I think it is time for the Squeak balloon
to
be grounded to connect with the reality of why computer languages exist - to make things easy for application developers.
I hope that you do not truly believe this, that Squeak should exist for the benefit of application developers. What about the 99.99% of people on the planet who are not application developers?
After all, it's not as if the application developers of the world aren't already focusing enough attention on their own self-centered interests, and it's not as though the world really needs yet another software productivity tool.
To me that is what makes Squeak special. It is a tool for thinking and learning, and it is accessible at people with all sorts of interests and ideas. It is not just for programmers and application developers.
I certainly do not want to discourage anyone from writing useful applications in Squeak, that would be great. It's just that to me, it would be really discouraging if Squeak got turned into a "development tool", and disappointing if people did not see its role as something more than just another programming language.
Just my personal POV.
Dave
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