> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Stefan Matthias Aust [SMTP:sma at 3plus4.de]
> Sent:	Tuesday, February 15, 2000 6:11 PM
> To:	squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject:	Re: warren _ squeakUser new.
> 
> The "smalltalk philosophy" to use the source for digging out the
> information yourself is IMHO born from the need.  Books would be better.
> Sometimes, you have to consult the source but if this leads to the pride
> of
> having reinvented (or even only just re-understood) the wheel, something
> is
> wrong.
> 
I think this goes back some concepts Dan Ingalls enumerated in his article
"Design Principles Behind Smalltalk" which appeared in the August 1981 issue
of Byte magazine (available on the web, thanks to the good efforts of Dwight
Hughes, at
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_
smalltalk.html).  To quote Dan's article:

	Personal Mastery:  If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it
must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

In my experience books are all well and good but when you want to find out
what's really going on, examine the system.  I've never found better (and,
occasionally, worse :-) documentation than the source code itself.  One of
the things I like best about Smalltalk is that I can figure out what's going
on, and what to do, by examining the system itself.  For example, if I want
to find a method which will tell me how long a string is I start with the
String class, look for an appropriately named method, and if I don't find it
I move up through the superclasses.  Eventually I find "size", which of
course is the correct method to use.  And I can find this faster using a
browser than I can with a book.  I cite this as an example because early in
my Smalltalk experience I actually did this.  I spent about half an hour
digging through manuals (Visual Smalltalk) trying to figure out how to find
the length of a String.  Finally I dove into a browser, and in a minute or
so found what I wanted.

Geez - digging into this gave me a chance to re-read this article again and
set me to remembering.  When the August '81 Byte issue came out I was about
two years out of college and cruising the world on an all-expenses-paid tour
courtesy of the U.S. government (translation: I was in the Navy :-).  I
remember being completely blown away by this Smalltalk stuff, and
confidently expected to see the world of computing change overnight.  As the
months went by I was disappointed - all this Smalltalk stuff that sounded so
wonderful was nowhere to be seen.  By the time I bought my first PC a few
years later the language du jour was Turbo Pascal, and I'd pretty much
forgotten about Smalltalk.  I wasn't until 1991, ten years after the Byte
magazine Smalltalk issue came out, that I got my hands on my first Smalltalk
system (Smalltalk/V for Windows, v1.0.  I still have the original manual and
disks :-).

Bob Jarvis
Compuware @ Timken