mwgrant2001 <mwgrant2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm in the process of looking. It will take a little to pen a 
> response. BTW please be patient, I'm a consultant and we are are the 
> end of the fiscal year....
Sure.

> > Nah, we like Swikis. They're late bound and we like that. 
> Smalltalkers
> > are into exploration and education, not planning and enforcement.
> 
> Others are into exploration too. It isn't enforcement and besides 
> there is nothing to provent you from having Swiki's at the same time. 
> The limited objective here is to provide a predictable and structured 
> environment for the beginners (let's do away with newbie) so so they 
> can EASILY find what they need to get started. You must prime a pump 
> for it to work. Frustration is counter productive to learning. 
An interesting phenomenon I've seen around Swikis is that sites/pages
that are well organized are also long lived. Quality creates discipline
- nobody is afraid of ruining a page that's run down anyway. So I don't
think Swiki and quality content (for newcomers or otherwise) are
mutually exclusive.

> That easy. The forum is the most useful. I check it several times a 
> day. Actually there is more than one forum. There is a help forum and 
> a developer's forum. Also the is a separate bug reporting mechanism. 
> As a result the help forum is much easier to browse the Squeak's. 
> 
> > [problems creating code]
> > So, IIUC, the problem is mostly deciding the subclass structure? 
> Common
> > practice is to subclass either Object, or another class that is 
> intended
> > for extension by subclassing, like Morph (a negative example - 
> almost
> > never subclass collections, they're intended to be used, not
> > subclassed).
> 
> Thank you. This is very helpful. Though I seem to recall advice in 
> one or more other OO languages saying do just the opposite. But these 
> thing do reflect the language don't they. Now I know how 
> Squeakers/STers look at it.
Note that Richard gave good detailed advice. About collections, you
*might* want to subclass them *iff* you are interested in creating
another collection. What I meant is that most people aren't creating
collecions - a library is there to be reused. If you are creating a
model (car) don't subclass Collection because you have multiple wheels,
just instantiate one.

> But it really doesn't illuminate the alpha-to-omega aspect 
> that I think would be helpful to beginners. Let me repeat from my 
> earlier email:
...
> The Ralph Johnson material also does do it at this point, but some of 
> his exercise might be extended into what I'm talking about. Also I've 
> started to re-explore some of the other Squeak related links. Frankly 
> I've not looked at Squeak for several months and does appear the more 
> material is there and/or things are getting more organized. Still 
> there is a long way to go to get a smooth entry portal for beginners.
Ok. Hope you can help us.

Daniel