On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 2:36 AM, tim Rowledge <tim@rowledge.org> wrote:

At the latest board meeting we got to discussing the relative quietness of the squeak list(s) recently. We were wondering what you folks out there are doing with Squeak, what you'd like to be able to use it for, the things that you think would be important to improve it for wider use and so on.

Please, whether you're a frequent user or an occasional look-at-the-list type, take a moment to let us know your opinions.

What do you use Squeak for?

Hi,

I have been using Squeak on and off since around year 2000.

I use Squeak as a personal development and recreational computing platform.

Mostly I think of stuff I find interesting and start to hack together project in either Etoys or

in Morphic. Along the way in those projects I find and fix bugs and get totally sidetracked from

my original intention. But it's all good fun and I enjoy it immensely when I track down issues and get them fixed

Once I learned the basic of Squeak development I found most other development environments lacking

and arcane. The bad thing is that I have never really hooked Squeak up to the outside of the image to interact

with other languages. I don't really know how to even start doing that.

If you don't use Squeak, why not?

There are many rough edges in the tools in Squeak. Like in the drawing tools and the sound tools.

I think it's mostly because the scope of all the tools are so huge and that there are only a few developers and

users, Not enough people to fix all issues.

Specialized tools have a huge advantage that are impossible for a general platform like Squeak to keep up with.

But to at all be able to do mostly what I want in Squeak is satisfying and I can dig into the source and read what

the developers did to make stuff work quite easily.

If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?

I use Squeak for recreation and not for business. When I have time and feel the need to scratch an itch I come back to

Squeak.

What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for 'regular' development?

There are so many thing that are easy and convenient to do once I am in the Squeak tools so I have never

gone into using stuff from other languages through stuff like FFI.

What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Dependencies on obscure preferences, cruft and user habits make

changes cumbersome for many of the parts of Squeak.

What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?

All personal computing and tinkering projects I do.

And it already does most of that.

Best,

Karl

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
C for sinking, java for drinking, Smalltalk for thinking