[squeak-dev] A Vision For Smalltalk

Overcomer Man overcomer.man at gmail.com
Sat Sep 10 14:24:13 UTC 2011


In my quest to install a Video application discovered in Squeak's Universe
browser into Cuis, I asked for help and received three critical pieces of
information.  The fact .mcz files are .zip files which need renamed to see
what's inside.  The location of the FFI library, invisible from the main
Squeak webpage.  And the packages within FFI to fileIn and in what order.
 The FFI works but the video application is still not fully installed, due
to another unknown bug.

Along the way I noticed the .mcz files contained a lot of other junk besides
Smalltalk code, and all the code for several FFI sub-projects is under the
same filename inside the different packages.  Using .mcz instead of .zip
is unnecessary complexity. The extra packaged files are not Smalltalk.  Why
not just use Smalltalk?

This reminds me of a job experience where the boss insisted I use a new
GUI-builder to add some features to Hot-Draw.  I knew Smalltalk, not the
language of the new GUI-builder.  So I worked with the inspector and
discovered the code needed to accomplish the job and did it in Smalltalk.
 The boss didn't realize the GUI-builder was a language divergence from
Smalltalk and work done with it was not maintainable.

It's obvious the Universe brower is passe'.  Do we really need the
Monticello browser or half the other tools?  Cuis frees programmers from a
lot that isn't Smalltalk.  People will do what they want but I suspect some
forks, even Pharo, could be collapsed into Cuis.

We need to focus on Smalltalk and developing user friendly applications with
it.  Building tools that obscure Smalltalk may lead to unmaintainability.
 The job of tools is to do real work for the end user.  Occasionally a new
tool is needed but constantly working on the toolbox is usually unnecessary.
 Keep It Simply Smalltalk.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20110910/6f47a329/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list