# delurk

  I find this discussion about attracting newbies interesting, because
  I'm one of them.  Let me give you guys a little summary of how I
  arrived at Squeak, and what difficulties I'm having at the moment.

[ how I got here ]

  programming history:
    gw-basic      (didn't know any better)
    pascal        (too restrictive -- didn't like it)
    x86 Assembly  (http://www.scene.org (demos are beautiful))
    C             (ditto)
    Ada           (way too restrictive -- trying to forget it)
    C++           (kinda ugly -- didn't like it)

    ( discovered The UNIX Philosphy by Mike Gancarz )

    /bin/sh       (became one with Unix -- kinda forces you to
                   find creative solutions by piping stuff
                   through filters -- it's hard at first, but
                   when you get better, it's fun in a perverse way).
    Perl          (closures, garbage collection, pervasive use of
                   regular expressions, interesting approach to OO,
                   -- blew my mind -- I like it a lot -- so fluid)

    ( discovered Design Patterns by GoF )

    Objective-C   (I've found that I like most things that claim
                   to have a NeXT influence.  Objective-C is no
                   exception.  For a compiled language, it's
                   really dynamic.  I really like it.  Found out
                   that Smalltalk was a big influence, so...)

    Smalltalk     (not yet, but I'd like to learn)


[ my impression of Smalltalk ]

  I've read a few texts about the early days of Smalltalk and Xerox PARC,
  and I find it inspiring.  I really like the part about bringing out the
  creative spirit in _everyone_ -- that's a noble thing to want to do.

  The language seems simple enough (although I haven't yet studied it
  in depth).  Time to RTFM and experiment with stuff.

  to Luciano : I listened to that speech synthesis demo, and I'm really
  impressed.  Can you do realtime speech synthesis w/ Squeak?


[ what's difficult ]

  I have fully embraced the Unix Philosophy.  I have converted more
  than a few people to the ways of Unix by demonstrating the power of
  the Unix way.  I'm not as skillful as the people who hang out in
  comp.unix.shell and comp.lang.perl.*, but I am proud to say that
  I have dropped jaws more than once by applying the Unix Philosophy
  to little (but not so trivial) problems.  I love one-liners.

  Thus the Squeak environment is very alien to me.

  - when I right click and see the pretty colored dots, what am I supposed
    to think?  (I think it's cool that the blue one at the bottom-right
    corner lets you rotate windows (although it can get messy and
    disorienting))

  - Is there any way to configure sloppy-focus instead of click-to-focus?

  - How does one run programs?  

  - How does one share programs?
    What do Squeak people do for persistent storage?

  - Should I even be calling them programs?
    Are programs just classes that need to be instantiated?


[ ps ]

  Is there anyone out there who uses Squeak as their primary environment?

-- 
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