Squeak pros and cons from a casual user

Torsten Sadowski torsten.sadowski at tu-berlin.de
Mon Jul 10 12:03:54 UTC 2006


Hi, 

after going over the weekends diskussions today I can't keep quiet.
There are many things about Squeak Tthat I like and some that make me think 
why do I care. First, I have no problem with the UI. I especially like the 
old version without rounded corners because it is the fastest.
I would not like to see wx or gtk as part of the base image. I have used wx 
with python quite a lot and it takes an awful amount of time to have 
something useful with all the defining of frames and menus and...

I like in Squeak the development cycle best now that I understood it. And I 
like the way I can do dirty things with living objects just with an 
inspector. I have yet to find another IDE/language where this is possible. 
The huge range of Morphs for almost anything is fantastic, the time spend 
finding the right Morph and understanding its behaviour is horrible. And many 
Morphs in a single project make everything really slow but for trying out 
ideas I can live with it.

The biggest drawback in Squeak is its instability. It is too easy to crash and 
hang Squeak with hanging being easier. Its like Windows 3.0. When I write a 
Python program and start it and find out there is an infinite or nearly 
infinite loop I kill the program and change the source. In Squeak it means 
using CMD-. and hoping I get a usable state again without the loss of data. I 
have even corrupted my image by saving at the wrong moment right before the 
crash. Crashing and hanging was my first bad impression after seeing the 
sweets coloured UI back in 3.2 and have been much more annoying than "non 
standard" look and feel whatever "standard" might be.

Cheers, Torsten




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