Some of us are already here.  I cannot speak for the others, but I have
long viewed Squeak as one possible escape plan from Windows, and to a
lesser extent from disappearance of Dolphin.  To be blunt, I am still
worried in that order, though that would change over time if Dolphin
indeed becomes unsupported.

>From a developer's perspective, it is a tough transition.  I can work in
Squeak, but it is a bitter pill compared to Dolphin.  From an end-user's
perspective, I fear that Squeak out of the box would cause mutiny.  As I
have always said, the GUI feel the problem.  I deal with busy users in
sometimes dire circumstances.  They cannot be expected to remember
whether they have previously opened a dialog (modality can be a good
thing).  I think I would be able to design and build around some of the
limitations.

Tweak scares me a bit.  The capability is fine (even great), but I have
reservations about dragging the compiler into it.  I would much rather
see a higher level GUI editor that uses a time-aware variant of a
traditional event system for routing.  While I am no big fan of native
widgets, I would probably opt for something like wxSqueak to force the
point.

ANSI compatibility, or at least friendliness would be a barrier.  My
favourite example is
the behaviour of #next, #next:, which "silently" answer nil or truncate.
 I think these basic reading methods should raise an error on end of
stream, with truncating variants (#nextOrNil, #nextAvailable:) allowing
one to be more relaxed.  I do a lot of parsing that needs to be right,
and "want my bad news early" vs. having something blow up later with no
clear indication of what went wrong, or worse yet, after incorrect
results have been obtained.  I could move to my own selectors, but I
worry about "reverting" and not getting the behaviour I expect.

Underscores.  I have a lot of code that uses them.  Sorry.  I talk to
databases that use them in field name, and field names make good choices
for selectors.  Lots of class names too, again thanks to external
sources.

I am glad to see that Andreas fixed some critical threading bugs.  I am
somewhat surprised that it took so long for them to surface.  How does
one square that with the popularity of Swikis and other server uses of
Squeak?  I would have thought they would stress the VM enough to show
such bugs, but they apparently did not, or worse yet, the community
largely ignored the problems???  Insights would be appreciated.

I am not sure how to copy with the loss(??) of Dolphin's overlapped
threads.  For those not familiar with them, Dolphin provides a way to
mark external functions to be called on a separate OS thread such that
only the calling Smalltalk Process is blocked.  With a really good SSL
Socket implementation, I should be able to wean from them.  By really
good, I mean that the image cannot hang when a network wire is pulled or
a machine or DNS entry does not exist.  The calling process should
block, but not the entire image.

Another thing that scares me a bit is printing.  I simply have not
investigated it in Squeak, but will need to do so.

That's one Dolphin user's perspective.

Bill




Igor Stasenko wrote:

Hopefully, some people will join a squeak community.

On 11/08/07, Chris Kassopulo <ckasso at ...> wrote:
> http://www.object-arts.com/content/blog/2007Aug10.html




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029