On Nov 20, 2008, at 5:28 PM, David Mitchell wrote:
Most of the things that make Smalltalk great (what makes Smalltalk Smalltalk) are the things that hold it back for a lot of people.
Maybe I'm naive on this, but it seems like it should be easy convince lots of people that Smalltalk has a beautiful syntax and a wonderful development environment.
If you want a more Unixy, scripty, Smalltalkish thing with syntax blended C and Perl that you can hack with a text editor, try Ruby.
I think this depends on how we define "scripty". I take that to mean quick, short, one off programs. I personally use Ruby for that today. However, I'd like to be able to use Squeak when things get a little bigger. For example, suppose I want to run an application every night that queries a database, produces some text report and emails it to several people. I don't see any reason why those kinds of applications should be difficult to write and deploy using Squeak, but they seem pretty difficult to me today because I can't get the headless stuff to work.
If you want objects all the time with a crazy amount of integration in the tools and little attempt at conforming to outside ideas, Smalltalk is your game.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Mark Volkmann mark@ociweb.com wrote:
I don't have a lot of experience with Smalltalk yet, but I really love what I've seen so far.
I'm curious what experienced Smalltalkers see as some of the reasons why it doesn't attract more attention. I understand the issues with Smalltalk in the past related to license costs and performance, but those have been addressed now. Have you tried to convince someone to consider Smalltalk and failed to convince them? Why do you think they rejected it? What improvements could be made to current Smalltalk environments, especially Squeak, that might sway them?
For me the biggest issue has been trying to run my code from outside Squeak. This includes running Squeak headless to do something script-like and configuring a GUI application to run in a way that doesn't require the user to know they are running Squeak. Both of these are supposedly possible, but very difficult to get right.
Mark Volkmann
--- Mark Volkmann