Joshua Marker lux@umich.edu wrote:
No! Not at all. I turn people on to squeak left and right, but can only do it so quickly because they find it hard to believe and I have to show them myself. I guess they're inundated with the 'better than sliced bread' hype that they don't believe it when it's true. <g> If I had a book I could hand them, written not just for smalltalk but for squeak.
Is there a significant difference?
There are some pretty substantial differences. Speaking as someone who was but is not presently a practicing programmer (I'm an IP lawyer), and as someone who has not seen the Smalltalk-80 books since graduate school in 82 and 83 but dusted them off to play with Squeak, I would love to have seen more squeak-specific documentation.
There are substantial differences in the BitBlt's, and of course, Morphic. But the key difference is that window-based user interfaces are not so brand new anymore -- much of the prose in the books is dedicated to teaching smart people the essentials of a GUI, which even my Mom understands as I write this.
Don't get me wrong -- Squeak and Smalltalk-80 are truly wonderful pieces of technology, at the same time old and hoary, hence mature, yet modern and full of promise as though it were just invented. It is a tribute to the folks at PARC that the system, derived so closely from the original, is as powerful and useful today in its present incarnation as it is. Its been nearly 20 years! Compare with other languages of that era. "Back to the Future" was a tremendously apt title for the Squeak white paper.
Nevertheless, a more "intermediate" reference, devoted to this modern view of Smalltalk would have been interesting and helpful to me. I didn't NEED a book to learn Squeak or Python, but the Smalltalk-80 books and O'Riley books, respectively on those languages was very helpful to getting up the learning curve quickly. Moreover, it would have saved me a lot of time to have had a simple reference to Morphic and the other deltas between the Smalltalk-80 books and Squeak-98.
That path would have be substantially less steep with a more modern exposition of the language and the system.