Reading this dialog feels like getting the blindmen�s view of an elephant.
Micheal I�ve been using balloon stuff in the form of bitmapfill and have not run into any problems not easily remedied.
You found some badly maintained classes. If they are the ones I think they must be they are the only ones using the flawed MatrixTransformationMorph. See my note further down.
Squeak is a strange animal. Maybe other smalltalks are too, I�ve only played with squeak and I�m in most departments still a newbie.
My take is that it is a living language. It grows as its users need it to grow and the words bump into themselves. There are no pretensions of Squeak being a production system. For reasons of tradition and politeness vestigial pieces remain around. Dead language that doesn�t announce that its dead. Like the parts of our DNA that don�t do anything useful for us.
My curiosity is what is it you are trying to implement? Can you tell a paragraph story of what your thing would do after you implemented it? What made you examine squeak as the implementation smalltalk?
You will have to judge what is best to implement your project in. If its well defined you could choose from a lot of well defined languages. If you are still playing with what it might be. If you are looking for useful ideas. If you are willing to learn from your mistakes.Well squeaks not production but its a pretty good scratch pad.
I think there is a big difference in perspective
between how you see
the world and myself.
- If a piece of code does what it advertises to do,
great. If it
advertises an API and only implements 2/3 of that
API, that is a
problem. 2) Yes you can produce a working system by tip toeing
around the
unfinished/broken/inelegant parts of any system. If
there was
documentation or even comments that would be much
easier.
- Citing applications that serve the Squeak
community as evidence of
Squeak's production quality is not sufficient if your
target is
end-users that do not care about Squeak and only care
about getting
their work done. There may be uses of swiki that fit
this example, but
I suspect that swiki uses a small percentage of the
code in the full
image.
Your last line is only true if what I want to do is
what others have
wanted Squeak to do, and have invested the effort in
fixing/finishing.
I would like to use Squeak, but that is difficult
given the breakages
of pretty basic functions I have been encountering.
Balloon is
advertised as a graphics model supporting scaling and
transformation,
but in fact only bezier curves support these
functions. Ovals and text
do not support these features. The 3.8 release is
advertised as
supporting multi-lingual features, but the code is
completely
uncommented, and I was unable to find external
documentation, or get a
simple answer from the list on the level of support.
I compare this with other open source projects that
have regular build
schedules, code documentation and comments, and bug
tracking that is
clearly available from their website and that
provides status
notification on resolution to the submitter. There
are a lot of
assumptions built into the Squeak community about how
to run a project
that I find difficult to bet my living on. I much
prefer Smalltalk and
the ability to persist (in the image) both the data
and the execution
artifacts. Once I really give up on using Squeak I
will stop bothering
you with my "complaining", but given the number of
threads on this type
of subject, I very much doubt that I am alone in this
perception.
Michael
On Jan 30, 2005, at 11:08 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:
Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com> wrote:
What I guess I am questioning is whether the image
has enough
integrity / quality of design to use in a production
project. If there are a
lot of unfinished stuff in the image, then our
maintenance effort grows
with the amount of the existing code we try to
use.
The crushing argument that Squeak has enough XYZ to
use for production
projects, is that people are successfully using
Squeak in production
projects. Given this reality, there must be *some*
hole in any
argument along the lines of "Squeak does XYZ and thus can't
be used in
production". It's being used in production.
Notable examples are
SqueakSource and Swiki. Swiki alone has 256,000
google hits.
So how can this be, given your concerns about code
quality? My answer:
because this code you are grousing about, actually
works.
Actual it doesn�t. Michael wasn�t very specific but the two classes he talks about are badly under maintained. They are the ones that use MatrixTransformationMarph which probably never worked correctly and certainly not correctly with the rest of squeak. (see mantis #0000857).
You have been complaining about Balloon and getting it wrong.
Now you are saying
maybe Balloon works, but its design is bad.
Consider this: serious
engineers don't rewrite everything from scratch
whenever they change a
design. Serious engineers have to allocate their
resources carefully,
and often it is a flat out mistake to spend time
prettying up the code.
If Morphic text processing reuses some of the text
processing code from
MVC, then so what? Isn't that good engineering?
If you want perfect pristine code, then there are
plenty of toy
languages around you could play with, where people
rewrite everything
from scratch all the time. If you want something
that is useful and
works, Squeak will be here waiting for you.
So there.
Lex
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