"Ken Collins" <kenncoll123 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious about which other Smalltalks Squeakers use. I imagine Squeak is 
> a/the favorite of Squeakers, but I'm wondering what other favorites there 
> are and why. I jump between Squeak, VW, and STX - always comming back to 
> Squeak - mainly to look into widget/GUI stuff.
> 
> Cheers - and Happy New Year!

Same!

I will just chip in with the same suspects: Started out with VW and then
GemStone with VW (way back when they had the Opal/Topaz stuff), did some
projects with VA and GemStone.

Then I discovered Squeak and the joys of working in an OpenSource
community - especially such a superb community such as the Squeakers.
Unbeatable. It doesn't matter if Squeak has shortcomings - they aren't
that important compared to the power of "us". We will fix them, simple
as that.

Today I use only Squeak but Jonas sitting beside me is using Dolphin in
a nice little cool project here on Bluefish and I might get drawn into
that. He is really pleased and the tool looks really neat and tidy. And
just a single 750kb .exe. :-)

Anyway, my impressions of "the others" are much like has been mentioned.
VW was rock solid - developing under Win3.1 with VW and Oracle and not
having a crash in months is NOT due to the stability of Windows... :-)
But why, oh why - is VW so darn expensive... They could have had a much
greater marketshare (and Smalltalk too) if they could have gone cheaper.
But hey, what do I know.

VA was also pleasurable - especially for the native UIs. But I never
looked into VA itself so perhaps as someone mentioned the code is of
less quality. It felt stable though.

GemStone is the powerhouse of Smalltalks. But not when talking UIs of
course. It is a pity that it is so expensive and that it has some
scalability problems (well, not the first 2 billion objects of course).
It also always annoyed me that I needed two Smalltalks to build an
interactive system. But Stephen and Chris are creating stuff that really
will make Squeak really attractive in this area. It would be nice to rad
how that work is going, Chris? Stephen?

And Dolphin seems like a really pleasurable proprietary Win32 Smalltalk.
Nothing negative in this remark - it fills that niche very nicely, I
just hope they make money to maintain it - Jonas has been muttering
about missing docs so... Hmmm.

And GNU Smalltalk I know exactly nothing about except for that it has
closures. utwe will have that Real Soon Now - right Tim? :-)

regards, Göran