Andreas Raab wrote on Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:26:40 -0800
> Hi Tim,
> 
> > My intended point was simply that Croquet _is_ written in a Smalltalk
> > (and obviously it could be written in VW if one wanted )
> 
> That "obvious" point is the one that I seriously doubt (unless we want to go 
> back to the "Turing complete" argument :-) To give you the dog-simplest 
> example: Given VW, how would I get any kind of working 2D environment into 
> Croquet? Flash? Sound? MPEG?

Back in 1997 I was asked to write a small educational application. I
really wanted to use Squeak but it was not then up to the task of
playing sound files in Windows (and compatibility with other platforms
was not needed). I was able to get Smalltalk Express to use a DLL to
handle this. Another advantage of ST Express was that it was more usable
on slow 286/386 machines with not much memory.

Just a few months later it would have been possible to do this
application in Squeak. It is a moving target and I suppose that so is
VW. I imagine that the latter has some way to call external libraries
and so could handle sound and MPEG movies. And OpenGL, most likely.

I do agree that having code that exists and works is far superior to
claiming that "it is a simple matter of programming", but in general I
would rather start with a poor Smalltalk and add what is missing than
use an alternative to be able to use some library. So perhaps we are
just discussing matters of taste and priorities?

-- Jecel