So, in anticipation of the new raft of newbies this is bound to engender, let's polish up the help pages and welcome them to the world of real computing. Its time -- what can we do to help?
I think the lack of documentation for Squeak seriously hampers widespread use. The newbie tutorial is a step in the right direction, but support for moving up to the next level of profiency is sparse. A look at the number of classes with no comments shows this, and it is entirely beyond me that most established, central Morphic classes which must have taken some time to think about and write are uncommented, lacking even 5 minutes worth of comments.
Looking at the demo classes does not always give the information needed, and in any case, examples are supposed to supplement basic documentation. It would be so nice if a definite decision was taken to deal with this problem, even at the expense of more neat things being added in the next version. As a matter of fact, a change set with basic comments for some of the Morphic classes would be welcome ASAP.
The lack of documentation is the most frequent complaint from students in the OOD/squeak class for which I am a TA, followed by by UI and colour scheme grumblings.
-Ashley George Taylor (ataylor@cc.gatech.edu)
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