There's no education like source code. :)

I agree

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 7:28 AM, Randal L. Schwartz merlyn@stonehenge.com wrote:

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"Sean" == Sean Allen sean@monkeysnatchbanana.com writes:

Sean> but i'm using squeak as my 'really learn smalltalk' einvironment so... Sean> can any suggest any good reading, books, websites, whatever for learning Sean> the ins and outs of how exceptions, signals etc work in smalltalk. i'm Sean> interested in both an 'end user' perspective as a start but getting into Sean> the nitty gritty of the why of the implementation as well. For me, the best way to understand the Exception class was to browse it, browse references to it, and also to the subclasses, especially with something like Seaside loaded that makes interesting uses of Exceptions to deal with continuations. Seeing how it works in practice made it finally go click. There's no education like source code. :) -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 merlyn@stonehenge.com URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/ Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

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cdrick wrote:

An idea: learning from source code could be documented too by small "how-to".

For instance to understand how sandstonedb works (which is already well documented thanks to Ramon) we could imagine that:

HOW-TO-LEARNING SDActiveRecord "file oodb persistency inspired by ruby activerecord framework" -restoring persistent objects

"put a self halt in SDActiveRecord class>>warmUp" (wich is called at startup for activerecord like objects, "save and quit". then "start again the image". This opens a debugger that will help you understand how persistent objects are restored... Debugger will open on Mock classes that exists for test reasons. It will also open on all your active records (subclasses of SDActiveRecord)

etc etc...

This is a small documentation effort that would be precious. We could also illlustrate with videos which if we had standard tools could be done without too much effort (I mean less than getting all done with text only)...

see: http://www.squeaksource.com/SandstoneDb/

My 2 cents ;)

Cédrick

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I strongly agree that the source code must be supplemented with something. GNU Smalltalk has excellent library documentation. Admittedly, in Squeak it's easier to browse the source-code thanks to Squeak's GUI, yet proper documentation would still be a huge boon to development, especially for neophytes.

Furthermore, in Squeak by Example there's this quote by Alan Knight:

Try not to care. Beginning Smalltalk programmers often have trouble because they think they need to understand all the details of how a thing works before they can use it. This means it takes quite a while before they can master Transcript show: 'Hello World'. One of the great leaps in OO is to be able to answer the question “How does this work?” with “I don’t care”.

We cannot really take that advice seriously if we force users to browse source code whilst building their applications. This is especially detrimental to new users, who generally want to start building applications as soon as possible, and care little about implementation. If they're forced to care about implementation I would guess they'd prefer to use something else, something with better documentation and a rival set of libraries, Python for example.