Learned smalltalk syntax. Whats next ?
Martin Drautzburg
martin.drautzburg at web.de
Tue Mar 26 12:46:21 UTC 2002
I have a problem
I am at a dead point at the moment and could use some advice.
I have now learnded enough smalltalk so I can think about
smalltalk programming without wanting to write a "continue" or
"break" statement every couple of minutes. Can also write
little programs without morphs. Good so far.
Next thing I thought, would be to dive into morphic, but is
wouldn't let me in.
I got stuck here
E.g. I thought it should be easy to give the browser a
gradient background. It is easy within a viewer, but this only
changes the running instance. Tried debugging the Browser when
is starts up. It is just too much to look at.
And there
Then I was trying to figure out what morphs to use for my
TicTacToe exercise. There must be roughly *400 Morphs* in the
system, many of them without a comment.
And there
Then I wandered if morphs can be used in a MVC type pattern. I
found an example for lists on the wiki that suggested the
answer is YES. Tried to figure out if other morphs have the
"View" capability too. No clue at all.
Classes vs. Objects
In general I am very confused by these Viewers. I can
understand that this is inspired by "self", that there are
just objects and objects are made tangible. But why would I
want to use a coputer at all if I want tangible objects ?
There are plenty of them on my desk (too many actually).
I used to think the power of programming comes from the power
of language (an not from the power of pointing at
things). Somehow I am not willing to change things in a
viewer, because then I don't know how it works. I was thinking
of writing applications in Smalltalk, not toys. OTOH I have no
clue how to figure out how things work.
Will I have to adopt the "self" philosophy to successfully
work woth morphic, i.e forget about Classes ? Manipulate my
objects with viewes and leave the details to the gurus. Should
the be two types of Smalltalks users/programmers: the
Class-Programmers and the Viewer-users ?
The paved road
There was this thread at c.l.s where a guy stated "I can't
learn smalltalk". This may be one of the reasons people prefer
other languages: there is more of a paved road which will lead
you into the language. The tutorials I found tend to suggest
that it is real easy. After that you know the easy parts. Big
deal.
Maybe I am just too impatient. I can see how powerful squak is
already and how fast it is evolving. I can see people giving
really smart answers on this list. I can "smell" the power
behind it all. If that wasn't the case I would have said "nice
try".
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