On Thu, Mar 16, 2000 1:59 AM, Peter Crowther
<mailto:Peter.Crowther at IT-IQ.com> wrote:
><soapbox type="Lux" bars="48" weather="throwing it down" location="Hyde
Park
>Corner">
>I think I agree with Lawson that [paraphrased: Lawson, please correct me
if
>I'm misrepresenting you] dumping a programming neophyte or a script bunny
>into the full Squeak development environment won't get you very far.  I
>disagree that the solution is to make the new environment look like the
old
>one.  If it was, we'd all be using Microsoft Visual Cobol 98 --- now with
>enhanced CICS support.  Sometimes it takes a person with a strong vision
of
>the future to [first] sell that vision and [later, after market
acceptance]
>impose that vision on people --- in this case, Bill Gates and his vision
>that BASIC is the language of the future.  If Squeak is to be as broadly
>accepted in the development world as VB is, it will need scripting-level
>access.  It's getting there.  Sure, it looks like nothing you've seen
>before, but I don't feel that's necessarily a Bad Thing(TM).  Markets
thrive
>on diversity and competition; uniformity stifles that competition.
></soapbox>

A plausible counter-view, I'll agree. However, if Squeak Central shoots for
"something completely new," I'd prefer it to resemble XTalk more than VB,
in the sense that it uses a more human-oriented syntax.

"set  [the] <property>  of <object> to <value>"

makes  sense to complete neophytes, and you lose no Smalltalk
functionality, that I can see, by allowing human-style syntax, since human
language is innately object-oriented.



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