Documentation

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Fri Jun 11 12:54:29 UTC 1999


	From: "Peter Hora" <HoraPe at ROYALST.training.wa.gov.au>
	Being a professional applications developer I would love to see a high-level description of how to build a simple data entry screen (as in 'maintaining attributes of a domain object through input fields') in MVC or Morphic under Squeak. Does something like that already exist somewhere?

No.  People have been asking for Morphic documentation, but there
is not much.  The people who have been writing it probably spent a
lot of time on it, so I don't want to denegrate their efforts, but
it takes an enormous amount of work to write good documentation.

	From: "Eric Ulevik" <eau at fast.fujitsu.com.au>
	Squeak needs to highlight the swiki stuff. Specifically, what I would 
	like is instructions on how to get a swiki web server running in 
	Squeak on my laptop. I gave up trying to figure this out a while ago.

Both requests are good examples of what I meant when I said that Smalltalk
systems in general, and Squeak in particular, need "how to" information.
Example methods are necessary but not sufficient.  It is much faster to
follow simple instructions than to figure out how some code works.  In the
long run, to be an expert Smalltalker, you have to learn how the code
works.  But that is a lot of work for beginners, and they can get Squeak
to do useful things a lot faster if they have have good instructions.

Lots of people would like to have a swiki on their laptop.  It isn't
hard to do it if you are a Smalltalk expert, but there needs to be
some instructions that don't require knowing anything about Smalltalk.

In the same way, there needs to be some instructions for building a
GUI that do not require people to have a deep understanding of OOP.

I would like to see some good documentation on book morphs and the like.
Several times I decided to take an afternoon off and figure them out, 
and have not succeeded yet.  It is SO much easier to learn this kind of
stuff if you can see demos and have someone explain it to you.  Writing
documentation that can stand on its own is a lot of work.  I think
everybody is underestimating it.

-Ralph Johnson





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