How does a newbie get past the feeling thay he is trying to understand an elephant whilst looking through a keyhole?

Stephen Davies stephen.l.davies at gmail.com
Sat Apr 29 11:55:20 UTC 2006


Hi,

I'm trying to get familiar with Squeak.  I used Smalltalk/V way back,
have and read and understand the Smalltalk 80 book, so it's not
completely new to me....

But Squeak is so much bigger.  I'm really struggling to get an overall
sense of the beast - I can't see the wood for the trees and for me, at
least, the environment seems to contribute to that because of the
method-by-method interface to the code seems to make it harder to get
the big picture.  Methods are presented in alphabetical order, without
much clue as to how they relate.  Similarly for classes.

Are there any pointers/suggestions?  I feel like I'm missing some tool
I don't know about.  It's great that you can see everything, but
understanding for me would be aided with some sort of "gradual
revelation"; a way to replace all the details of a class or bunch of
classes with conceptual documentation - showing in a screen or two the
overall story of that class's purpose and place in the system.  And a
way to dip under that to the implementation as needed.

Any comments or suggestions for me?

Thanks,
Steve Davies



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