> Joshua Marker <lux at 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.