fun and empowerment
Doug Way
dway at mat.net
Thu Jan 27 20:58:52 UTC 2000
On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Michael Chean wrote:
> My experience also parallels Jerome's. Because of my inexperience I am not
> a very strong advocate for Smalltalk, but just the task of convincing my
> engineer friends to look outside their comfort zone has proven impossible.
> My friend at JPL considers Smalltalk as having missed the boat, which seems
> to be the case. When I mentioned that I was following this list he
> suggested I look at Tcl/Tk instead.
I've actually been using Tcl/Tk as my primary development language at work
for the last couple of years, and I can tell you that Smalltalk is still
vastly superior as a general-purpose programming language.
Tcl/Tk has its good points... mostly Tk, actually. It's arguably slightly
better than Smalltalk for writing very small GUI applications, because you
can just write a short script. For medium to large GUI applications, the
power/flexibility of the language becomes more important, and Smalltalk
wins hands down in terms of development time and maintainability.
Smalltalk (especially Squeak) is also more fun. Although Tcl/Tk is still
relatively fun compared with something like C++. :-)
There are other factors to consider... for example, if your application
requires a UI with 100% MS Windows look & feel, Squeak probably wouldn't
work (yet), although a few of the other Smalltalks would. It's certainly
possible to create a reasonably professional UI with Squeak, though... I
recently worked on a commercial project with Squeak which accomplished
this. (Speaking of which, I made some enhancements to the "BobsUI" UI
framework which I've been meaning to release shortly.)
If your app just needs to spit out html as a web server, Squeak would be
great for that.
It's a little odd that your friend mentioned Tcl/Tk as an alternative to
something that "missed the boat", as it doesn't really have any greater
overall mindshare than Smalltalk. (E.g., if you search monster.com, you
will see a similar number of Smalltalk and Tcl/Tk job postings.)
- Doug Way
EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
http://www.transom.com
dway at mat.net, @eai.com
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