Hi all!

A few down-to-earth thoughts about this problem:

1. Dandelion: http://www.mars.dti.ne.jp/~umejava/smalltalk/stClasses/dandelion/ - this project
could perhaps get some more attention that it deserves. Even though I agree that solutions within
Squeak (and not for example HTML docs) are perhaps preferred, this is also a good complement. It
would also put some pressure on people to really write comments. (JavaDoc has this effect - if you
do not comment your code the JavaDoc generated HTML shows it...)

2. Class comments. Class comments. Class comments. I use to say that.. Whatever you do, AT LEAST
write a descent class comment. Unfortunately a lot of the base classes are uncommented. And of
course, somebody else than the author could write them. But it still would be best if the authors
wrote them themselves. Yes, this is criticism! :-) :-) And the idea to change the browsers so that
the comments are visible without a "mode switch" could also make missing class comments more
visible and annoying, thus fostering the culture of making sure they are there.

3. Examples, examples, examples. The best way to learn how to do something is to study something
that already does it! :-) Then of course, we could vamp up our arsenal of studying tools, like
animated debuggers (I have also longed for such a tool), Object Explorer (or whatever that visual
graph inspector-thingy in VW was called) etc. etc. But if we do not have school-book examples to
study, those tools will be limited in use.

4. Perhaps build an official "newbie trail" with step by step recommendations to tutorials, etc.
Even if there are a lot of tutorials and other material around, it can be hard to know in which
order you should go about learning Squeak.

My two cents.

regards, Göran

=====
Göran Hultgren, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
icq#:6136722, GSM: +46 709 472152, http://www.bluefish.se
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi
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