What is Squeak?

SmallSqueak smallsqueak at rogers.com
Tue Dec 21 08:36:28 UTC 2004


Mark Guzdial wrote:

> Congratulations, PhiHo!  You finally annoyed someone enough with your 
> comments that you get a response!
>

    Sorry, Mark! I'm neither aroused nor annoyed enough.

    Please accept a raincheck !

    PhiHo.

    P.S: On second thought,

>
> On Dec 19, 2004, at 10:53 PM, SmallSqueak wrote:
>>> I think we should make Squeak recognizable to people who have heard of
>>> it via public means like Alan's talks and the nublue book.
>>
>>    If Alan and Dan don't care then who cares ?
>>
>>    Do the authors of the Squeak books care ?
>
> The point isn't whether Alan or Dan cares.  The point is to encourage the 
> future members of the community.  I didn't write the white book nor 
> co-edit the nublue book for people ALREADY in the Squeak community.  I 
> wrote them for newcomers, to introduce them to Squeak (white book) and to 
> the wonderful stuff inside/behind Squeak (nublue book).  So, yes, it is a 
> concern if these newcomers go to http://www.squeak.org and find something 
> that is unrecognizable as "Squeak."
>

    Obviously, we are looking at the issue from different points of view.

    To me if anyone "bets their farm" on OS2 just have to live with
    its death. Behind my back is a  stack of Red Books from Big Blue.

    Having said that, I believe Squeak will never suffer the fate of OS2.

    This is not because of "Whos's Behind Squeak" (when Squeak was
    at its peak? ) but rather because Squeak is open source and because
    of what are above and beyond Squeak.

>>    Did they do anything to bring the contents of these books up to date ?
>
> The last update that I did was for Squeak 3.2 -- visit 
> http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/  to see that update (just like it 
> says in the book).  I can't get Prentice-Hall to publish a new edition, 
> though -- not with a couple thousand unsold books in the warehouse.
>

    Thanks for the link. This suddenly reminds me about the discussion,
    many many moons ago, was it something about complaints that  the book
    went obsolete before it was printed ?

    It was then still under SqC regime, no "annoying" Guides, Cleaners,
    packages... to blame.

    Now, many many moons later, I am a bit surprised that it's still at 3.2.
    My expectation was 3.6 with Anthony' super duper turbo Squeak.
    IMHO Multimedia Squeak deserves all  speed improvement it can get.

    Or was it about  freely available Programming Ruby first edition:

    http://dev.rubycentral.com/downloads/files/ProgrammingRuby-0.4.tgz

    ( Latest First edition Release: 0.4 Date: July 17, 2002  )

    ( The second edition Oct. 2004, 864pp

                http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html

    still affordable to poor newcomers at 25$ for PDF book.)

    Maybe this is the real reason why Ruby is out there and "Squeakers are
    gathering around the fire" and Squeak books are gathering dust in the
    warehouse?

    Maybe at the end of the day Squeak savior turns out to be a writer,
    not a visionary nor a geek nor a nerd.

    That might even be just a multimedia writer capable of showing off
    how cool Squeak multimedia features are to wake up those dumb
    marketing executives at big PC hardware houses to have Squeak
    pre-installed in their MultiMedia Center PC's.

    [SNIP]

    Cheers,

    PhiHo.




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