[Webteam] Feedback for "About" page integration

Tue Jan 23 15:43:54 UTC 2007

Larry Trutter wrote:
> Here is the first draft of my attempt to integrate two different "About"
> page into one. I don't have access to the test web page so I post the
> text here. I did not make any attempt to rewrite the whole thing. So I
> have been conservative with the changes.
> 
> If any of the information is out of date, let me know and I can update
> it. There are several sections that I did not modify so I did not
> include those texts.
> 
> So any feedback on this are welcome.
> 
> thanks,
> Larry Trutter

Some comments:

===
1. I would removed "especially" from this sentence:
Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from especially Simula, Sketchpad
and Lisp and even today Smalltalk sets the bar for object oriented
dynamically strongly typed interactive languages and environments.

===
2. It would be nice to explain, in a couple of words within the
sentence, what "real live objects" mean:

"You may be familiar with other open source languages like Ruby or
Python, but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a
true uniform fully reflective environment - real live objects."

===
3.I like to have bullet points of the basics right up front. So, instead
of talking about the "kernel" in the "What is Squeak", I think it is
better to place overall features such as (but not necessarily):

---
Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include:

    * real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk
    * extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased
image rotation and scaling
    * network access support that allows simple construction of servers
and other useful facilities
    * bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others)
    * a compact object format that typically requires only a single word
of overhead per object
    * a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit
direct pointers with efficient bulk-mutation of objects
---

I like to see a point or two about education too.

===
4. It'd be nice to know what "reflective" means. It's not a term that is
used often.

===
5. This sentence is redundant. I suggest removing:

Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and
network access, with complete source code.

===
6. I'd change:

 -- to include even the VM.

to

 -- including the virtual machine.

===
7. I would rewrite the paragraph starting with:

Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy...

It has several different ideas and could use rewriting and separation.
For instance the next paragraph:

"Squeak runs bit-identical images across..."

can be merged with a few sentences of this paragraph.

===
8. I never thought the "Philosophy" section made any sense toward the
philosophy of Squeak. Squeak carries on the torch that Smalltalk lit in
the 70s. I would think that a summary of Alan's "The Early History of
Smalltalk", about the concept of objects and especially focusing on
children and learning would be better here.

Generally, I would like to see more about education threaded throughout
the text.

Thanks for taking on the challenge, Larry. It's a tough one!

> 
> 
> The following sections were left intact:
>  About
>  What it is not
>  A Brief History of Squeak
>  Squeak is Free, with a Liberal License
>  Squeak Support
> 
> The following sections are changed/integrated:
> 
> What is Squeak?
> When Smalltalk was created more than 35 years ago it defined the term
> object orientation and is the first language in which everything is
> built from objects. Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from
> especially Simula, Sketchpad and Lisp and even today Smalltalk sets the
> bar for object oriented dynamically strongly typed interactive languages
> and environments.
> 
> You may be familiar with other open source languages like Ruby or
> Python, but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a
> true uniform fully reflective environment - real live objects.
> 
> The Squeak kernel includes:
> ·    A largely Smalltalk-80 and ANSI Smalltalk X3J20 compatible language
> and base libraries
> ·    A fast virtual machine written in a subset of Squeak
> ·    A bit identical compact 32-bit direct pointer object memory
> ·    An efficient incremental hybrid generation scavenging mark and
> sweep garbage collector supporting bulk-mutation of objects
> ·    A virtual machine plugin system with plugins for most parts outside
> the core like networking, file I/O, sound and graphics
> ·    Bit-identical execution including graphics on all major computing
> platforms including most versions of Windows, MacOS and Unix/Linux, OS/2
> Warp and RiscOS. And if your platform wasn't included in that list,
> Squeak is easy to port.
> 
> On top of this there are class libraries and virtual machine plugins for
> very advanced multimedia including anti-aliased 2D and accelerated 3D
> graphics, real-time sound and music synthesis, MPEG2 video and much
> more. In addition, Squeak has one of the most advanced fully reflective
> development environments ever created with over 600 addon packages
> available for single click download and installation.
> 
> Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites.
> Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and
> network access, with complete source code.
> Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community
> have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows NT,
> XP Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common
> flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).
> 
> 
> What is Cool about Squeak
> "The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution
> hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into
> bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations
> of incomplete ideas."
> - Alan Kay
> 
> Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students,
> business application developers, researchers, music performers,
> interactive media artists, web developers and many others. We use Squeak
> for a wide variety of computing tasks, ranging from child education to
> innovative research in computer science, or creation of advanced dynamic
> web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based Seaside framework.
> 
> Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness
> -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend
> for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine,
> complete, compact, efficient and robust Smalltalk environment. It is not
> specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy --
> you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a
> new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public
> domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential
> applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan
> Kay, Ted Kaehler, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of
> the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in
> the world.
> Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a developer,
> researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for
> every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual
> machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to
> see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk.
> 
> Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base,
> greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. Any image
> file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely
> different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).
> 
> 
> Philosophy
> Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose
> virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to
> debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a
> translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is
> comparable to commercial Smalltalks.
> 
> The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical Smalltalk bytecode
> interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit direct-pointer object
> memory and incremental garbage collector. It also includes a BitBlt
> graphics system that supports 1-, 2-, 4-, and 8-bit indexed colors, as
> well as 16- and 32-bit RGB colors, together with a "warp drive" that
> supports fast rotations and other affine transformations, as well as
> simple anti-aliasing. Other notable (and equally portable) capabilities
> of Squeak include 16-bit sound input and output, and support for sockets
> and general network access.
> 
> The portability and sharability of Squeak, together with its
> malleability (since it is all in Smalltalk, a competent Smalltalker can
> change anything about it), has given rise to a lot of interest in the
> academic community, and what one might call the "independent" computer
> science community. By this phrase we mean to include people who are not
> so interested in one language over another, or one OS over another, but
> who have their own particular passion (numerical analysis, graphics,
> distributed computing, music synthesis, O-O education, etc) and who want
> a system that can provide the most flexible and immediate command over
> experiments in their field of interest.
> 
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brad fuller
 http://www.Sonaural.com/
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