On Wednesday 03 March 2004 17:23, Aaron Lanterman wrote:
> But the claim "It is no longer necessary to write cryptic programs"
> on the www.smalltalk.org site is utter BS. Smalltalk is often
> extremely cryptic.

As you say in the subject, this varies from person to person. My 
experience is that most of the population would prefer to read 
Smalltalk to C, Cobol to Fortran, Pascal to Lisp and so on. Think of 
the success that Hypercard once was. I will fully agree, however, that 
the current generation of programmers might find Smalltalk less 
readable than Java or something.

It depends in part on your previous experience and in part on learning 
style and work habits. In the 1980s the big issue was

   NOT ( done OR ( count>7 AND remaing=0 ))
vs
   !( done || ( count>7 && remaining==0 ))

If you tend to read the program "aloud" in your head, then the first 
version might be easier to understand. If you tend to parse things 
visually, on the other hand, then the second version might make sense 
faster.

In the Squeak system browser, try choosing "tiles" from the rightmost 
button and see if that makes things better or worse for you. How about 
colorPrint?

I am very interested in this subject since I defined a new syntax for 
Neo Smalltalk (http://www.merlintec.com:8080/software/4) where I aim 
for simplicity by making the user do most of the parsing work when 
entering the source.

-- Jecel