Who has no job? (was Re: O'Reilly Squeak book?)

Charles Hixson charleshixsn at earthlink.net
Thu Apr 18 17:30:18 UTC 2002


Warning:  Critical newbie message.

Cees de Groot wrote:

>Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> said:
>  
>
>>>Actually, I might be interested myself. Being unemployed helps.
>>>      
>>>
>>So just how many of us are unemployed right now? Seems like an awful
>>lot of us....
>>
>>    
>>
>Probably if you count in everyone who has a job but isn't allowed to use
>Smalltalk there, 99% ...
>
>  
>
And it shows in the language design.

I'm really too new here to be speaking, but being a quite new user, I 
perhaps have a perspective on how Squeak looks to a new commer (i.e., a 
potential convert)...
Sorry, but this is basic.  Dialogs need to look reasonable.  There needs 
to be a decent way to make them.  There needs to be a decent way to 
align the parts.  There needs to be a good way to secure them against 
right-clicks.  (I have been told that such a way exists, but the 
environment doesn't give evidence of it.)

Squeak is a great environment for programmers.  It seems to be a lousy 
environment to turn end-users loose in.

This could all be answered if there were a good way to create a "stand 
alone executable".  I notice that Dolphin sells that as their high end 
product.  But this is so basic that no professional application can be 
created without it.  (Well, maybe some, but none that I could use at my 
job.)

The power of Squeak really amazes me.  It's so easy to create an 
animation.  Etc.  But the appearant weaknesses are equally amazing.

The basic parts of most jobs are:
Text Work, Database work, (a tiny bit of misc.)
The users interact via interfaces, which must be predictable. 
 Customization should be restricted to "power users", and even for them 
there needs to be an easy way to reset the interface to it's default 
state.  So when they've confused themselves, they can recover.

Where Text and Databases interface there need to be reports.  Printed 
reports.  With headers and footers, page numbers, dates, etc.. 
 Sometimes tables of contents are important, though usually that's only 
for Word Processing documents.  But indicies are often imporant, and 
they need to index by page number.

Squeak should be an excellent environment for this, but it's missing 
features.  There isn't any obvious way to build these things (I told you 
I was a newbie!).  I built a part of the Rolodex example, and now I'm 
looking at it and saying to myself:  What's the best way to align these 
boxes?  A grid mode would help this tremendously, but if it's available 
I can't figure it out.

Then I say:  If I were to want to print this out, what would the 
printout look like?  It wouldn't look like the data entry screen, so 
having a basic association between the text field and the data is the 
wrong organization.  There needs to be a database (even a flat file 
would be better!) underneath this, and the entry form needs to be just 
one view of the data.  A report would be another.  Different views could 
have different sorts, so perhaps an indexing system needs to be a part 
of the view ...  etc. (This sounds like it might be MVC, but the 
tutorials seem to ignore that option.)  Now how do I print it out 
scrolling down the page 2 columns wide?

Perhaps one of the other Smalltalks can handle this.  But the last time 
I checked into this (a couple of years ago) none of the ones that I 
could afford to evaluate could.  And most of them were tied to Windows. 
 (The actual reason that I'm looking at Squeak is in hopes that it could 
be an acceptable cross-platform development environment.  I've also been 
looking at Ruby and Python, but they don't have very good GUI 
environments.  [Fox works ok on Windows, but the Linux version of 
FxRuby, e.g., never seems to work with the version of Fox that got 
installed.].  And it's also difficult to create a packaged program with 
them, though Python has some tools that make it possible if not easy.)

These don't seem to be intrinsic weaknesses.  In fact, they all look 
pretty elementary (if complicated).  But new users can't do anything to 
fix them.  And can't even produce a toy application that's good enough 
to show to the boss.  (The right-click halo alone is enough to prevent 
that.)  So I may use Squeak at home, but until these are repaired (or 
until I know how to work around them) I'll never be able to use it in my 
job.






More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list