Squeak's "general acceptance"

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Wed Jul 6 11:26:21 UTC 2005


On Wed, 06 Jul 2005 02:26:21 -0700, Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Of those I know?  All of them.  Including me.  Not, obviously, that any  
> of us decided to build our businesses around Squeak before using it for  
> a while, but all of us started using (or writing ;) Seaside while new to  
> Squeak and never looked back.

Seaside is, IMO, a good entree to Squeak, though that almost seems  
paradoxical. (I think it may be because it's a small but useful subset of  
functionality, sorta like learning to program in teletype-mode.) I came  
very close to using it for a project I have right now. The only thing that  
stopped me was that my target is PDAs.

> I'm not trying to make any particular point here, just offering  
> information since you asked.

Nor was I. And thanks.<s>

> Am I turning my nose up?  I'm sorry, I genuinely didn't mean to be.   
> Just because I don't think Squeak will ever have the mass-market appeal  
> of Delphi

Next time I'm on a Delphi board, I'm going to have to tell them they have  
"mass-market appeal". They'll enjoy that. (It's all perspective, eh?)

< certainly doesn't meant we shouldn't try to address individual
> concerns.  And I'm hardly uninterested in the issue of connecting to  
> relational databases - I've written, for Squeak, several tools for  
> object/relational mapping (the most interesting of which is probably  
> ROE), a binding for SQLite, a simple bridge to let you use JDBC drivers,  
> etc.  I actually don't think Squeak's database access story is that bad  
> (at least from my web developer's biased view), but it could certainly  
> be improved.

I don't know if it's good or bad. I just know the bar is WAY higher than  
elsewhere. And that seems wrong.

> - it sounds like you were having trouble installing the ODBC package.   
> It actually works fine for me; can anyone else reproduce the issue?

I'm using the 3.8-6665 from squeak.org. It looks like I can't install much  
without getting the eocd error, including  Worlds of Squeak. But now it  
looks to me like the problem may be a connection issue. All code update  
servers seem to be unavailable, all squeakmap master servers are down  
(though the package loader itself comes up). Scamper can get ftp sites but  
says the unibe.ch proxy is down if I try to get an http.

> - there's no good data grid; definitely a problem, but one several  
> people have mentioned they're working on.

Yep. I'm following a half-dozen works in progress. Have been for some  
time. Hoping this will all lead to contributions from me rather than just  
complaints.

> - anything else?

There are other big issues, of course. But nothing that hasn't been hashed  
over a zillion times already.




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