On 7/10/06, Torsten Sadowski <torsten.sadowski at tu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 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 don't agree, the development speed is gained trough abstraction
level, squeakgtk and wxsqueak are a simple wrapper around gtk and wx.
In SqueakGtk however i'm trying to give the nearest squeak style to
deal with gtk objects, and creating an application is almost fast as
using Morphs. Also Morphic has its own problems, first of all that's
not user friendly and you won't create applications outside a squeak
context, and that's slower than a Wx/Gtk.

> 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.
>

If we could anchor this to the previous discussion about Gtk and Wx,
it's possible to create a toolset for them, for example a browser, an
inspect at runtime it's possible. Halos could be toggled as well in
development state and so on...

> 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.
>

This depends on how you design your application. Take care to save the
image before doing anything else, and keep an eye on loops... also you
can fork instead of running tests in the UI process. You won't lose
data if you write good code...

> Cheers, Torsten
>

Bye.

-- 
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