Squeak readable to most people on this list, but is it to everyone?

Darius Clarke DClarke at fadal.com
Fri Mar 5 02:10:11 UTC 2004


Aaron,

Does using the "tile" view in the browser help you mentally parse
complex Smalltalk lines any better?

I'm very curious about what you answer will be.

Perhaps the tile view should be presented to beginners early.

Cheers,
Darius







-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Lanterman [mailto:lanterma at ece.gatech.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 12:23 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Squeak readable to most people on this list, but is it to
everyone?



On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Colin Putney wrote:

> 3. Even when badly styled, Smalltalk is one of the most readable
> programming languages available.

Alas, I don't find that to be the case at all.

I've been playing with Squeak since October. I've read Kent Beck's
Practice Patterns book front to back. I've been through Mark Guzdial's
entire white book, with Squeak up and typing in examples and trying them
as I go. I did the Morphic chapter in Mark+Kim's blue book, again typing
in examples and trying them as I went. I've played around with writing
my
own smalltalk student, and have been helping an undergrad working with
me
debug my code.

But even after all that... stick a complicated line of Smalltalk in
front
of me, and I freeze in bewilderment for at least a few seconds, and then
if I very carefully step through each token at a time, and write in
parentheses (if I'm reading a book) or type in parentheses (if I'm
actually at a Squeak browser) according to the precedence rules: unary
first, binary second, message third. I find reading Smalltalk to be slow
and painful. I feel like the language turns me into a human parser, and
I
feel the Ls and Rs and numbers percolate in my brain.

Repeat same painful process for next line.

It can take me quite a while to read through and understand a method.

I don't think it's just the unusual syntax - Lisp/Scheme has an
unconventional syntax, but I picked that up almost instantaneously and
usually have not trouble reading a Lisp program.

I like Smalltalk, and I adore Squeak. I see it as the right way to do
things. Although I have a hard time reading Smalltalk, the consistency
of
the language strongly appeals to me. The block closures that let you
roll
your own control structures are brilliant. I want to embrace Smalltalk.
Morphic is the coolest thing about Squeak, and I never want to go back
to
doing things the non-Morphic way.

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.

Anyway, I just want to throw in the thought that for many on this list,
Smalltalk may flow smoothly, but for the world out there seeing it for
the
first time, it may not be so obvious, and there may be many potential
new
Smalltalkers who will get turned off and not dig deeper due to their
initial frustration.

Indeed, it was only the fact that someone I know and respect a lot (Mark
Guzdial) was a big Squeak fan that gave me the fortitute to keep at it.

- Aaron

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Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.       Voice:  404-385-2548
School of Electrical and Comp. Eng.    Fax:    404-894-8363
Georgia Institute of Technology        E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
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