[UI] Re: Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

[Andreas Wacknitz]

The following is from a different subject but I find it more appropriate 
for the "Promote Squeak/Smalltalk" thread:

Bill Schwab schrieb:
> Lukas,
>
> Gary provided the authoritative answer, to which I will add that a stray
> method to set the various preferences might be helpful.  We will all
> have our own variants, but it is getting hard to tell which options are
> not truly independent.  FWIW, it is a great problem to have.
>
> As far as keyboard focus being off topic: it is **ON TOPIC**.  I wish
> you guys could have heard Aileen type.  Failing that, watch a clerk who
> has learned how to work without a mouse (and hates having to stop to
> touch it) pound on a keyboard.  We should be able to meet their
> expectations.
>
>   

Meeting expectations is a good catchword. And to make a long story short:
Squeak is often advertised as being "multi platform" and having a decent 
class library.
In my experience the reality is different:
Windows is supported best, followed by Mac and Linux x86.
Every other platform has more or less problems:
- On Solaris (x86 and SPARC): FFI is not supported and thus no depending 
packages like
   ODBC (so no generic database connectivity).
- Are there any actual VMs and images for ARM, MIPS or something similar?
- What about Linux on non-Intel?

Another, often discussed problem area for Squeak is its not standard 
conforming GUI.
It may be that Morphic is in many areas superior to most other GUI 
frameworks. Nevertheless
it is very difficult and annoying to create GUIs for standard business 
applications
(eg. the aforementioned bank account SW).

Code quality and documentation is another major concern. There is a lot 
of brilliant code
in the Squeak base. But there is also a lot of mess in it. And you can 
be sure that most
experienced programmers will find many more occurrences of mess than 
brilliant code.
At least the mess is more likely to be remembered.
Furthermore it is quite easy to find problems and annoyances in the 
tools of a standard image.
(BTW I have similar experiences with ST/X. It takes only a few minutes 
to find MNUs in the
standard tools.)

Did I mention that Squeak is sometimes painfully slow on my Sun Blade 
2000 (equipped with
two US-III+ processors and 8GB RAM)? This has two causes: gcc produces 
slow code for SPARC
(and Sun C and its tool chain is not quite supported) and Morphic (or at 
least most of Squeak's
GUI) is painfully slow.

Regards
Andreas