[UI] Re: Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

[Bill Schwab]

Andreas,

Some random thoughts:

The standard (and not altogether unreasonable) answer to "no support for
x on y" is "Want FFI on Solaris? Write it."  You are correct in pointing
out the deficiencies; "they" are correct in pointing out that "we" could
help more.  Sadly, I suspect many would help more if help were more
aggressively accepted.

I accept some blame for failing to make it easier to write certain apps.
 I really should put an MVP wrapper around some of the morphic chaos. 
Various things have distracted me, including learning more about Linux -
Squeak is of dubious value to me if I stay on Windows, hence the
diversion.  Ubuntu installs quite easily, though an upgrade to 7.10
fried my VPN (getting to be a pain) and added/revealed some largely
cosmetic bugs.  I also want to get craftier with shell scripts.  I am
starting to think fondly of "reinstall, run custom script, return to
find re-configured machine."  Come to think of it, I want the same thing
for Squeak, getting the latest version of various things (Gary's work
being high on the list) w/o having to click and wait my way through a
GUI.  No lack of gratitude implied; the GUIs are great, but sometimes a
script is the better way to go.

I also looked at ST/X, and found pretty much what you did.  It has
strong supporters, but early experiments left me concerned that it would
fail a lot too easily for my taste and needs.  

Re Squeak's GUI speed, have you tried some older versions?  IIRC, Squeak
took a real speed hit somewhere around 3.8 or 3.9????  That's not to say
"downgrade or suck it up," but I _am_ curious if older versions are
faster.  One nice thing about slow platforms is that slow code crawls
all the more on them. 

To add a concern to your list, what about incompatibilities with other
dialects?  To continue my rant about streams,

   'hello' at:200

raises an error, but 'hello' readStream next:200 truncates.  Hmmmm. 
Dolphin and VW get this one right.  Nile includes some beginning efforts
to rewrite some methods to use its streams, but to really fix it (I
think) requires a breaking change.  I am tempted to turn the RB loose to
turn #next into #nextOrNil and #next into #nextAvailable: (there might
be others I have yet to recognize), and then begin work in the new image
after adding some methods and/or switching to Nile.  Add confusion over
that to my list of reasons/excuses for delay in MVP ;)  Humor aside, it
*is* a concern to me.

So, what are we going to do to fix all of this stuff?

Bill





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

>>> A.Wacknitz at gmx.de 01/30/08 4:20 PM >>>
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

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