Tim Rowledge wrote on Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:36:01 -0800
What do you use Squeak for?
I am using Celeste in Squeak to reply to this email.
Many of my presentations have used Squeak.
Squeak is a key technology in my projects (the SiliconSqueak processor) including for most of my simulations
Since I always have a window open with Squeak for email, I often use it as a calculator for more complicated things (I use an actual calculator for simple things and LibreOffice spreadsheets for really complicated things).
If you don't use Squeak, why not? If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?
I like many languages including other Smalltalks. Though I am very interested in Cuis I never used it because some of the things that were ripped out were stuff I used in my presentations. Once I had a short deadline for a presentation and downloaded the latest Squeak on a new laptop but found that thumbnails had been broken. The fix was trivial, but I ended up doing the presentation in Prezi since I couldn't risk running into more problems. More recently stupid OS security restrictions in running Squeak off a USB pen drive have made me do presentations in PDF instead.
But the truth is that Self is my favorite Smalltalk for technical reasons and the Squeak community is the reason for me using that. And one aspect of that community for a long time was the leadership of the PARC people - very much like a reunion of the favorite band from your childhood. That put Squeak along with VisualWorks in a special place among all Smalltalks and we lost a bit of that after Squeak 3.2. The split with Pharo and Cuis certainly changed the community somewhat, but I think this was a good opportunity for Squeak to be more strongly commited to Etoys, which took a long while but eventually has mostly happened.
What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for 'regular' development?
Modularity needs to be improved. It should be possible to start really small and as transparently as possible use anything out there. Right now we start big and have too much trouble loading extra stuff. And given that we don't have computers with just a few MB of RAM anymore it is silly to have to manage separate .source and .changes files. I think these two issues are related.
What things are too hard or annoying to do?
Obviously writing class comments?
What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?
Run stuff like Frank, Croquet and so on all at the same time instead of as separate images.
-- Jecel