I'd love to have a free mPod from Microsoft. If you can arrange it, please do. I'd also be willing to take an xbox, or anything really.
An entire campus of anything isn't a big deal. Coke and Pepsi buy out entire school districts across the whole country, paying a few million to the district so that they only carry and have machines which sell Pepsi or Coke products.
.Imagine Duke giving every student a Palm Zire...which most students would promptly toss in their desk after a month of occasional use if their classes didn't require it--most still won't, btw. But an iPod...the students will love those and use them!
That is exactly what happened here with an iPAQ initiative here at the U of MN Duluth. Most students didn't use them. Only two profs used them at all in their courses, and one of them was just to look at BMP files of circuits for ECE I. Most students didn't care. The IT staff that works here each got one too and they just sit on their desks, very dusty and not charged for two years.
But an iPod... People would use that. Or at least, I'd hope they would. But I personally would still avoid a school that made me purchase or lease one, though if I had the money to go to Duke, that policy would a bit different.
For our chancellor, the "wow" factor was about 95% of the decision. She has said that it was to make the school look technologically advanced and that there were no concrete plans to use them. COOL! Nothing like $800 for an iPAQ and assorted crap.
No joke. Do you think Computer Science I teachers are doing revolutionary new research into how to teach kids C? Well, maybe, some are. But for most classes that most profs teach it has nothing to do with their research. A lot of unis try to give profs classes with material they at least don't hate, but not even that sometimes.
Most professors aren't babies. They want their students to succeed, not just show up and be a warm body in the seat.
I've never known a prof who cared about using tape recorders. Mind you, I've only gone to this University (U of MN Duluth) and a community college in HS, but still I've never heard of such a thing.
It doesn't have to be a high school for college kids to want to do other things. We had iPAQs introduced for the two years of incoming CS and ECE students. Bad idea. We're not Duke, but the U of MN Duluth isn't St. Cloud State either. They will get distracted.
God, no joke. Especially with Starship Troopers. It is very rare that I've read something that seems so perfect as pop-sci-fi, although it is certainly above being "just" pop sci-fi. But the story seemed like it'd make a great movie with very little changed. Morons a plenty, that's what we've got here.
Huh. I always thought of him as "the Foundation dude." Part of my wants to say "highly reccomended, check out the Foudnation series by Asimov," but it wasn't my thing. I was a bit disapointed, having had everyone I know tell me I was in for an epic treat. Alas.
Umm... Rich dad, indeed. I'd be a "rich dad" too if I could sucker people into paying $200 for a board game. That, and if I was a dad. But rich at least.
Dynapad, the project isn't dead. I'm the one who'd know, I'm it's pappy. However, Dynapad the site at swiki.net is often dead. I rather doubt that the US gov is blocking access- swiki.net is just flaky as hell lately. Never used to be bad, but it is now.
As a consequence, I've moved it over to Utaria.net, being hosted by them for free, which is very nice of them. It is at dynapad.utaria.net.
There has not been a release for a very long time, although I've released some newer screenshots, but still old.
What's the deal? It is very hard to find time for anything when you're working 50 hours a week and going to school full-time. Hopefully, that should change this fall semester, when I forgo school for a "real" full-time job, instead of a "shit-paying, second-class employee" or "student" job. Just 40 hours a week is a vacation, hopefully a long one, during which I will make a Dynapad release.
A lot has gone into Dynapad since the last release (2 years ago? jesus). Worth at least two releases of apps and upgrades. But, being a one man project currently ran by a man with not only no time, but a bit of a trade deficit.
I'm always accepting folks to give me a hand, either willing to learn Smalltalk or know it already. I've long wanted another coder or two who'd allow me to design and manage the project, but helped out with coding. One day!
Your "insight" works fine when you're talking about people who make less money. But when you're talking about people who make $250K or more, it's easy to save. There are a lot of side effects of being rich- one of which is having a much larger line of credit. The wealthy can afford to take out some sort of loan and "spend" their money, all the while their real money is gaining interest- that is, making them more money. Yes, like anyone else, they have to pay that money back, but in the end, they have more of a net gain.
Hint: Most of the wealthy in the USA are not movie stars who make 22 million dollars a pop for a movie.
Re:Changed the view of the US?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No joke. One of the reasons the wealthy are wealthy is that they know how to save. How to put their money somewhere it gains interest, be it the bank or the market.
Yeah, except Win 3.1 sucks balls. As does anything that runs on it. At least, that's my experience; I'm not talking about "all Windows r teh suck"- I use 2k and XP with few real complaints. But 3.1 was hell. I used DOS and then Linux, never touching anything until 98, though I should've waited until 2000. But on a machine that old, I say use DOS and Minuet + Lynx or Anarchon (so?), a graphical dos browser.
I think the source of the spaz is that Slack calls its packages.tgz, but I imagine the source of it is similar to why I cited- DOS. You used to be able to install off of DOS 8.3 formatted disks- d1.tgz , etc etc. Slackware still has.tgz packages, but they're still.tar.gz files.
Not sure about what this dude is spazzing about, but I and plenty others have been using TGZ as a replacement for.tar.gz for a looong time, before he ever heard of leenoocks. Mostly on DOS machines, where you only had a three letter extension- or when you're too lazy to type.tar.gz, but that is pretty damned lazy.
Heh. Weird that 340 MB constitutes a "minimal" install of Linux. I must come from an older school... I installed RH 5.2 on a p60 lappy with a HD about that size over a parallel port connection without incident and space left over. No need to delete docs or anything.
But then again, I used to run slack on a 486, with a 100 MB ZIP disk as/root. Wasn't cramped then, but like I said, I must be from an older time.:)
eloquent: adj.
1. Characterized by persuasive, powerful discourse: an eloquent speaker; an eloquent sermon.
2. Vividly or movingly expressive: a look eloquent with compassion. See Synonyms at expressive.
unless.... does pkgsrc speak to you? am i not the only one? does it tell you too to KILL KILL KILL?
But have you actually tried to use Squeak or any of his other projects? They make neat demos. They demonstrate ideas very nicely. But I haven't found the "real, live, usable".
Yes, very much so. As I've pointed out in this thread and plenty of other times over the years, Squeak is basically my desktop OS. I have written some simple glue that allows me to run Squeak full-screen and easily switch to the only other app I need the regular OS for- a modern web browser, which means Safari or Firefox for me. That is thanks to the ever-so-slick AppleScript plugin that has been in Squeak for a very long time. I started implementing something very similar using Windows Scripting Host for Windows, but never had the time or reason to finish it.
Aside from the browser, I can do most of it in Squeak. Granted, some of it involves running the vt100/xterm client- but it's written in 100% Squeak. My email goes through the Squeak email client, Celeste, or Pine on a school Unix machine. I chat through the Squeak IRC client. I write code in Squeak's browsers. I post to my LiveJournal, keep track of RSS feeds and the weather with my own little widgets, kind of like Konfabulator for OS X, but they're nothing "special"- making them is quite easy with the Morphic GUI toolkit, so it's not as big of a deal as it is on OS X or Windows, where people are used to being forced into working one way with their data and apps.
Another practical aspect of Squeak for me is Dynapad. Dynapad is a PDA operating system/environment written in Squeak by me. I mostly stated the project as a reaction to the death of the Newton OS. The NOS is a lot like Squeak- you've got a nice, dynamic OOP language and the system is written in it. And unlike systems written in a crufy and static language, extending or modifying apps is pretty easy to do.
Some old screenies here. In this case, the little date book apps especially takes advantage of the kinds of technologies that make Squeak what it is. Older ones here, but I've been beyond burn-out busy in the last year.:/
Kay has been out of the visionary stage for a long time. I may be a blip, but I'm not the only one who uses Squeak for more than just cute demos. I don't use most of the new demoable features, most of them not being terribly interesting to me. But that doesn't stop Squeak from being the most productive environment I've ever used.
In addition to me using Squeak like this, myself and others have written apps in Squeak. No, they don't look like a native OS X/Windows/GTK+ app, but where I've used it for apps I've shared with others that wasn't an issue.
And for those who are dying to have a bland and consistent UI (no problem with that!), there is the Squeak binding to wxWidgets- wxSqueak.
Why should Kay have to limit himself to some other environment simply because you prefer it? Sure, Kay or someone else could re-write GTK+ so that it had the kind of power- useful *and* demoable power- that the Morphic toolkit has. Or add this to Quartz. But why? Kay isn't in the business of appeasing those who wouldn't be happy anyway by the work. Kay, like a lot of old and new Smalltalkers, is comfortable in that world. I am one of those people. I only use Windows, OS X and Linux as little as I have to, mostly as a host for Squeak and a usable web browser. The rest I can do within Squeak itself. On my Linux machine, I was even able to dispose of X11, instead using the links/g (with graphics) browser displaying to the framebuffer- and Squeak displaying on another fb console.
I'm not saying that this sort of setup would be for everyone. It's not! But then again, a hardcore emacs user just looks nuts to most people- at least my environment looks and feels very close to any other modern GUI system superficially. I use Squeak because it is the only environment that exists [1]. I can't do this stuff i
...and it's darn near impossible to get the GUI working with GST, even on a very vanilla x86 Linux machine. A shame too- I think if GST were more popular more of the linuxheads would take a look into Smalltalk. Smalltalk is rather outside the average Unix user's experience- they expect their languages to be of the crusty old form, whether it's a compile-link-debug cycle of C/C++/Java or the slightly less annoying system of Perl and Python. But Squeak doesn't fit into Unix well in some ways, where GST goes a great job IMHO. At least, it'd be doing a great job if it actually did *a* job.
Just a guess: Did you go to GaTech or some other school where they use Squeak in a class? A lot of people seem to get bitter after that, especially if they didn't like the prof.
I'm with Abcd on this one. Myself, I prefer Squeak to any other desktop environment. I get absolute power over my GUI environment, but I don't have to exercise any of that power if I don't want to. I can use the standard config and GUI preferences. But I don't. Squeak affords me total control over my environment, in a way that doesn't exist on the other GUIs of Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. The GUIs of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are all so much more confining and limiting. There are some perks to any given one of em, but nothing that touches Squeak.
Pre-Macintosh windowing system? Methinks you haven't used Squeak in a very long time. Sometime before Morphic was usable, and you were in MVC, which actually was the windowing system that pre-dated and fathered the Mac OS. These days, Squeak's GUI system/toolkit- called Morphic, and Morphic has very few real rivals. Sure, there is Self's Morphic, but that doesn't really count.:P
On Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, people have been getting giddy over tools like Konfabulator. Don't get me wrong, they're fun extensions to the desktop. But I'm pretty non-plussed. I've been doing the same thing in Squeak for a long time now, without needing anything special. If I want to put up a widget showing the temp and cloud cover icon for my zip code, it's pretty trivial... Drag out the appropriate Morphs, write a couple lines of Smalltalk code to grab the sunny/cloudy/raining cloud gif and display it.
And no, people don't have to do that every time they want a little weather monitor. I can save the object and share it with others, so that they can get their weather updates without having to do anything more than click "install" in SqueakMap.
See this for a photo of a more modern Squeak. This is still a little old, though, from around a year ago. I can use any IceWM theme with Squeak. I wish I had a screenshot of the weather widget I used to use, it was purty.
Another great example- check this out. What we have here is a Windows-like taskbar. Nope, that isn't stock Squeak. First, I installed an IceWM theme (easy as pie) and then I wrote up that little taskbar. See, a newbie popped into IRC (irc.freenode.net - #squeak) and said he wished he had a taskbar like Windows has for managing his open and minimized windows in Squeak. Always up for a small challenge to show someone new how great Squeak can be, I wrote that up for him. The whole process- between updating the people on #squeak as I wrote the code, playing around with colors, doing the actual coding *and* putting it up on SqueakMap for easy download and install took 45 minutes. About 20 minutes of that was spent doing the last step- I had never put any code up on SqueakMap before that, so I had some docs to read to find out what to do. But 25- or even 45- minutes to write up a Windows taskbar? You have to admit that's not too shabby. I can't imagine how long it'd take for something similar to be whipped up for, say, WindowMaker.
That's the kind of power Squeak gives me, a feature I use all the time to make my enviornment more useful.
If you need to communicate with someone, Squeak is not the way to go. Send an email using one of the millions of other solutions.
Why not use both? After all, Squeak does come with an email client, though it does SMTP+POP3 out of the box, IMAP (over SSL to, I think?) was added a while back as well. Nothing weird about it- it's just regular email.
And it goes beyond that. Squeak has a number of fun methods of communication, all very easily installable using SqueakMap. SqueakMap is like Debian's apt-get
You're certainly right there- LOGO has the ability to be a powerful language. It's got the right stuff already there. But unlike Squeak, it lacks practical value in using it beyond turtle graphics and other intro programming. LOGO could be as practical as any language, but it lacks the environment and the libraries. Squeak contains a lot of room to grow, LOGO doesn't. Not unless the student wants to recreate the wheel a million times over... That said, the problem would be solved some if using a turtle grpahics system on top of DrScheme or something. Like Squeak, it has a lot of the best of both worlds.
And I agree about your OOP statement. And I'm a Smalltalk fan and programmer. OOP is no magic bullet, but all indications show that it will be sticking around for a while. Which means that a good early introduction to the concepts of OOP is a good thing for kids learning some programming now who made up being programmers down the line.
Newer than what? The quoted text could just as well describe, say, AppleScript Studio. Or Hypercard, for that matter. Or a cast of dozens of others.
Exactly. I didn't say that Squeak was the only place where you could draw your GUIs, and it certainly wasn't the place where this was invented. Although, it probably was done first in Smalltalk, though way before Squeak- but anyone know for sure?
Newer than what? Newer than old-skool Smalltalk-80 style MVC programming. Or newer than writing your Morphic GUIs programatically from scratch. That is, instead of coding it by hand like so-
| m | m:= AlignmentMorph newColumn. m color: Color black;
addMorph: 'Welcome to my app!' asMorph;
addMorph: (SimpleButtonMorph new
color: Color red;
action: #beep;
target: self);
openInWindow.
The first contact I had with programming was LOGO at a very young age. My answer to that question is that LOGO doesn't take it far enough, doesn't provide room to grow in. Squeak does. A person- a kid or adult- can learn the basics of programming ala LOGO using Squeak. But when she does, it's not just making a turtle move around the screen with simple procedural commands, rather getting down the idea of creating objects, and then attaching actions to them. Perhaps not a huge difference on the surface, but when it comes down to learning OOP [1] it is an important distinction. Unlike LOGO, that basic, core intuitive knowledge of OOP programming can be expanded upon within the same environment, and this learner can make the step up, going from just making balls bounce around the screen to writing a simple rolodex application with the same principles and no code; then make the step to writing database driven webapps with the Seaside webapp framework and the MySQL driver, or even better, the Magma object database.
[1] Not to say that I think OOP is any sort of end-all-be-all, especially as it's imagined to be in the industry. But for someone learning to program at 15 years old right now, real knowledge of OOP would come in handy when they get their first job programming when they turn 20- OOP won't be some ancient COBOLian relic, something you've heard of but no one ever uses.
Squeak isn't all that hard to figure out. But if you're used to having a nicely written book, you can buy one- a couple exist for Squeak specifically. But Squeak's online documentation is lacking, there's no doubt about that- especially in the area of newbie reorientation. Making apps in Squeak is different than making apps in Java, C++ or even Lisp. The environment's different for one.
The basic idea for creating a program in Squeak is to open up the Class Browser. Make a new class. Code away. Depending on what your program does, you may need more than one class.
Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.
It is an (not *the*- anything can be improved) ideal environment for kids- when you've got people teaching them. People used to coding in the same form for a long time often have a hard time learning Squeak. But then again, a lot of old assembly and C hackers have a hard time doing C++ or Java without spending a lot of time thinking about how to design OO systems instead of procedural ones. But old dogs can learn new tricks.
I learned Smalltalk and Squeak on my own, teaching it to myself. I had no problem doing it. Didn't have a text book- or any book, for that matter. While there were even fewer online docs back in those days, that's where I started, but then moving to mostly exploring the system. In Smalltalk, you have the Class Browser, which allows one to browse the source code to anything in the system. I learned by example and by doing. So far, that's how I've learned every language I know, and doing it by just reading books doesn't work for me. When I wanted to know how to make a GUI, I looked at the source of the simplest built-in apps in Squeak, learning how a GUI was constructed. Then making something simple of my own, a simple Address Book. After that point, it's just a matter of checking the reference- that is, looking at the class hierarchy and for the methods that are provided.
I think some personality types don't take well to this kind of exploratory programming, prefering to learn in a more passive way. That's fine- to each her own. Squeak tends to draw folks that do like that style of learning and doing. When it's learned, it is really handy. "Learning" Java for me didn't take that long, and it's mostly a matter of having the on-line class reference handy for me to write a program. In the best case, Squeak would provide more documentation for those who learned to program the old fashioned way, but in any OSS community, no one wants to be the one to write such docs.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Even better!
I want the job of "iPod technologist." That'd rule.
I'd love to have a free mPod from Microsoft. If you can arrange it, please do. I'd also be willing to take an xbox, or anything really.
An entire campus of anything isn't a big deal. Coke and Pepsi buy out entire school districts across the whole country, paying a few million to the district so that they only carry and have machines which sell Pepsi or Coke products.
.Imagine Duke giving every student a Palm Zire...which most students would promptly toss in their desk after a month of occasional use if their classes didn't require it--most still won't, btw. But an iPod...the students will love those and use them!
That is exactly what happened here with an iPAQ initiative here at the U of MN Duluth. Most students didn't use them. Only two profs used them at all in their courses, and one of them was just to look at BMP files of circuits for ECE I. Most students didn't care. The IT staff that works here each got one too and they just sit on their desks, very dusty and not charged for two years.
But an iPod... People would use that. Or at least, I'd hope they would. But I personally would still avoid a school that made me purchase or lease one, though if I had the money to go to Duke, that policy would a bit different.
For our chancellor, the "wow" factor was about 95% of the decision. She has said that it was to make the school look technologically advanced and that there were no concrete plans to use them. COOL! Nothing like $800 for an iPAQ and assorted crap.
No joke. Do you think Computer Science I teachers are doing revolutionary new research into how to teach kids C? Well, maybe, some are. But for most classes that most profs teach it has nothing to do with their research. A lot of unis try to give profs classes with material they at least don't hate, but not even that sometimes.
Most professors aren't babies. They want their students to succeed, not just show up and be a warm body in the seat.
I've never known a prof who cared about using tape recorders. Mind you, I've only gone to this University (U of MN Duluth) and a community college in HS, but still I've never heard of such a thing.
It doesn't have to be a high school for college kids to want to do other things. We had iPAQs introduced for the two years of incoming CS and ECE students. Bad idea. We're not Duke, but the U of MN Duluth isn't St. Cloud State either. They will get distracted.
God, no joke. Especially with Starship Troopers. It is very rare that I've read something that seems so perfect as pop-sci-fi, although it is certainly above being "just" pop sci-fi. But the story seemed like it'd make a great movie with very little changed. Morons a plenty, that's what we've got here.
Huh. I always thought of him as "the Foundation dude." Part of my wants to say "highly reccomended, check out the Foudnation series by Asimov," but it wasn't my thing. I was a bit disapointed, having had everyone I know tell me I was in for an epic treat. Alas.
Umm... Rich dad, indeed. I'd be a "rich dad" too if I could sucker people into paying $200 for a board game. That, and if I was a dad. But rich at least.
A couple replies-
Dynapad, the project isn't dead. I'm the one who'd know, I'm it's pappy. However, Dynapad the site at swiki.net is often dead. I rather doubt that the US gov is blocking access- swiki.net is just flaky as hell lately. Never used to be bad, but it is now.
As a consequence, I've moved it over to Utaria.net, being hosted by them for free, which is very nice of them. It is at dynapad.utaria.net.
There has not been a release for a very long time, although I've released some newer screenshots, but still old.
What's the deal? It is very hard to find time for anything when you're working 50 hours a week and going to school full-time. Hopefully, that should change this fall semester, when I forgo school for a "real" full-time job, instead of a "shit-paying, second-class employee" or "student" job. Just 40 hours a week is a vacation, hopefully a long one, during which I will make a Dynapad release.
A lot has gone into Dynapad since the last release (2 years ago? jesus). Worth at least two releases of apps and upgrades. But, being a one man project currently ran by a man with not only no time, but a bit of a trade deficit.
I'm always accepting folks to give me a hand, either willing to learn Smalltalk or know it already. I've long wanted another coder or two who'd allow me to design and manage the project, but helped out with coding. One day!
Your "insight" works fine when you're talking about people who make less money. But when you're talking about people who make $250K or more, it's easy to save. There are a lot of side effects of being rich- one of which is having a much larger line of credit. The wealthy can afford to take out some sort of loan and "spend" their money, all the while their real money is gaining interest- that is, making them more money. Yes, like anyone else, they have to pay that money back, but in the end, they have more of a net gain.
Hint: Most of the wealthy in the USA are not movie stars who make 22 million dollars a pop for a movie.
No joke. One of the reasons the wealthy are wealthy is that they know how to save. How to put their money somewhere it gains interest, be it the bank or the market.
Yeah, except Win 3.1 sucks balls. As does anything that runs on it. At least, that's my experience; I'm not talking about "all Windows r teh suck"- I use 2k and XP with few real complaints. But 3.1 was hell. I used DOS and then Linux, never touching anything until 98, though I should've waited until 2000. But on a machine that old, I say use DOS and Minuet + Lynx or Anarchon (so?), a graphical dos browser.
Exactly. I ran WindowMaker. And wrote papers in LaTeX in emacs or pico. /me shrugs; worked for me.
now that was eloquent.
I think the source of the spaz is that Slack calls its packages .tgz, but I imagine the source of it is similar to why I cited- DOS. You used to be able to install off of DOS 8.3 formatted disks- d1.tgz , etc etc. Slackware still has .tgz packages, but they're still .tar.gz files.
Not sure about what this dude is spazzing about, but I and plenty others have been using TGZ as a replacement for .tar.gz for a looong time, before he ever heard of leenoocks. Mostly on DOS machines, where you only had a three letter extension- or when you're too lazy to type .tar.gz, but that is pretty damned lazy.
Heh. Weird that 340 MB constitutes a "minimal" install of Linux. I must come from an older school... I installed RH 5.2 on a p60 lappy with a HD about that size over a parallel port connection without incident and space left over. No need to delete docs or anything.
/root. Wasn't cramped then, but like I said, I must be from an older time. :)
But then again, I used to run slack on a 486, with a 100 MB ZIP disk as
eloquent? do you mean elegant?
eloquent: adj.
1. Characterized by persuasive, powerful discourse: an eloquent speaker; an eloquent sermon.
2. Vividly or movingly expressive: a look eloquent with compassion. See Synonyms at expressive.
unless.... does pkgsrc speak to you? am i not the only one? does it tell you too to KILL KILL KILL?
But have you actually tried to use Squeak or any of his other projects? They make neat demos. They demonstrate ideas very nicely. But I haven't found the "real, live, usable".
:/
Yes, very much so. As I've pointed out in this thread and plenty of other times over the years, Squeak is basically my desktop OS. I have written some simple glue that allows me to run Squeak full-screen and easily switch to the only other app I need the regular OS for- a modern web browser, which means Safari or Firefox for me. That is thanks to the ever-so-slick AppleScript plugin that has been in Squeak for a very long time. I started implementing something very similar using Windows Scripting Host for Windows, but never had the time or reason to finish it.
Aside from the browser, I can do most of it in Squeak. Granted, some of it involves running the vt100/xterm client- but it's written in 100% Squeak. My email goes through the Squeak email client, Celeste, or Pine on a school Unix machine. I chat through the Squeak IRC client. I write code in Squeak's browsers. I post to my LiveJournal, keep track of RSS feeds and the weather with my own little widgets, kind of like Konfabulator for OS X, but they're nothing "special"- making them is quite easy with the Morphic GUI toolkit, so it's not as big of a deal as it is on OS X or Windows, where people are used to being forced into working one way with their data and apps.
Another practical aspect of Squeak for me is Dynapad. Dynapad is a PDA operating system/environment written in Squeak by me. I mostly stated the project as a reaction to the death of the Newton OS. The NOS is a lot like Squeak- you've got a nice, dynamic OOP language and the system is written in it. And unlike systems written in a crufy and static language, extending or modifying apps is pretty easy to do.
Some old screenies here. In this case, the little date book apps especially takes advantage of the kinds of technologies that make Squeak what it is. Older ones here, but I've been beyond burn-out busy in the last year.
Kay has been out of the visionary stage for a long time. I may be a blip, but I'm not the only one who uses Squeak for more than just cute demos. I don't use most of the new demoable features, most of them not being terribly interesting to me. But that doesn't stop Squeak from being the most productive environment I've ever used.
In addition to me using Squeak like this, myself and others have written apps in Squeak. No, they don't look like a native OS X/Windows/GTK+ app, but where I've used it for apps I've shared with others that wasn't an issue.
And for those who are dying to have a bland and consistent UI (no problem with that!), there is the Squeak binding to wxWidgets- wxSqueak.
Why should Kay have to limit himself to some other environment simply because you prefer it? Sure, Kay or someone else could re-write GTK+ so that it had the kind of power- useful *and* demoable power- that the Morphic toolkit has. Or add this to Quartz. But why? Kay isn't in the business of appeasing those who wouldn't be happy anyway by the work. Kay, like a lot of old and new Smalltalkers, is comfortable in that world. I am one of those people. I only use Windows, OS X and Linux as little as I have to, mostly as a host for Squeak and a usable web browser. The rest I can do within Squeak itself. On my Linux machine, I was even able to dispose of X11, instead using the links/g (with graphics) browser displaying to the framebuffer- and Squeak displaying on another fb console.
I'm not saying that this sort of setup would be for everyone. It's not! But then again, a hardcore emacs user just looks nuts to most people- at least my environment looks and feels very close to any other modern GUI system superficially. I use Squeak because it is the only environment that exists [1]. I can't do this stuff i
...and it's darn near impossible to get the GUI working with GST, even on a very vanilla x86 Linux machine. A shame too- I think if GST were more popular more of the linuxheads would take a look into Smalltalk. Smalltalk is rather outside the average Unix user's experience- they expect their languages to be of the crusty old form, whether it's a compile-link-debug cycle of C/C++/Java or the slightly less annoying system of Perl and Python. But Squeak doesn't fit into Unix well in some ways, where GST goes a great job IMHO. At least, it'd be doing a great job if it actually did *a* job.
Rule #1: To each his own.
:P
Just a guess: Did you go to GaTech or some other school where they use Squeak in a class? A lot of people seem to get bitter after that, especially if they didn't like the prof.
I'm with Abcd on this one. Myself, I prefer Squeak to any other desktop environment. I get absolute power over my GUI environment, but I don't have to exercise any of that power if I don't want to. I can use the standard config and GUI preferences. But I don't. Squeak affords me total control over my environment, in a way that doesn't exist on the other GUIs of Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. The GUIs of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are all so much more confining and limiting. There are some perks to any given one of em, but nothing that touches Squeak.
Pre-Macintosh windowing system? Methinks you haven't used Squeak in a very long time. Sometime before Morphic was usable, and you were in MVC, which actually was the windowing system that pre-dated and fathered the Mac OS. These days, Squeak's GUI system/toolkit- called Morphic, and Morphic has very few real rivals. Sure, there is Self's Morphic, but that doesn't really count.
On Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, people have been getting giddy over tools like Konfabulator. Don't get me wrong, they're fun extensions to the desktop. But I'm pretty non-plussed. I've been doing the same thing in Squeak for a long time now, without needing anything special. If I want to put up a widget showing the temp and cloud cover icon for my zip code, it's pretty trivial... Drag out the appropriate Morphs, write a couple lines of Smalltalk code to grab the sunny/cloudy/raining cloud gif and display it.
And no, people don't have to do that every time they want a little weather monitor. I can save the object and share it with others, so that they can get their weather updates without having to do anything more than click "install" in SqueakMap.
See this for a photo of a more modern Squeak. This is still a little old, though, from around a year ago. I can use any IceWM theme with Squeak. I wish I had a screenshot of the weather widget I used to use, it was purty.
Another great example- check this out. What we have here is a Windows-like taskbar. Nope, that isn't stock Squeak. First, I installed an IceWM theme (easy as pie) and then I wrote up that little taskbar. See, a newbie popped into IRC (irc.freenode.net - #squeak) and said he wished he had a taskbar like Windows has for managing his open and minimized windows in Squeak. Always up for a small challenge to show someone new how great Squeak can be, I wrote that up for him. The whole process- between updating the people on #squeak as I wrote the code, playing around with colors, doing the actual coding *and* putting it up on SqueakMap for easy download and install took 45 minutes. About 20 minutes of that was spent doing the last step- I had never put any code up on SqueakMap before that, so I had some docs to read to find out what to do. But 25- or even 45- minutes to write up a Windows taskbar? You have to admit that's not too shabby. I can't imagine how long it'd take for something similar to be whipped up for, say, WindowMaker.
That's the kind of power Squeak gives me, a feature I use all the time to make my enviornment more useful.
If you need to communicate with someone, Squeak is not the way to go. Send an email using one of the millions of other solutions.
Why not use both? After all, Squeak does come with an email client, though it does SMTP+POP3 out of the box, IMAP (over SSL to, I think?) was added a while back as well. Nothing weird about it- it's just regular email.
And it goes beyond that. Squeak has a number of fun methods of communication, all very easily installable using SqueakMap. SqueakMap is like Debian's apt-get
You're certainly right there- LOGO has the ability to be a powerful language. It's got the right stuff already there. But unlike Squeak, it lacks practical value in using it beyond turtle graphics and other intro programming. LOGO could be as practical as any language, but it lacks the environment and the libraries. Squeak contains a lot of room to grow, LOGO doesn't. Not unless the student wants to recreate the wheel a million times over... That said, the problem would be solved some if using a turtle grpahics system on top of DrScheme or something. Like Squeak, it has a lot of the best of both worlds.
And I agree about your OOP statement. And I'm a Smalltalk fan and programmer. OOP is no magic bullet, but all indications show that it will be sticking around for a while. Which means that a good early introduction to the concepts of OOP is a good thing for kids learning some programming now who made up being programmers down the line.
Exactly. I didn't say that Squeak was the only place where you could draw your GUIs, and it certainly wasn't the place where this was invented. Although, it probably was done first in Smalltalk, though way before Squeak- but anyone know for sure?
Newer than what? Newer than old-skool Smalltalk-80 style MVC programming. Or newer than writing your Morphic GUIs programatically from scratch. That is, instead of coding it by hand like so-
Then what's wrong with LOGO?
The first contact I had with programming was LOGO at a very young age. My answer to that question is that LOGO doesn't take it far enough, doesn't provide room to grow in. Squeak does. A person- a kid or adult- can learn the basics of programming ala LOGO using Squeak. But when she does, it's not just making a turtle move around the screen with simple procedural commands, rather getting down the idea of creating objects, and then attaching actions to them. Perhaps not a huge difference on the surface, but when it comes down to learning OOP [1] it is an important distinction. Unlike LOGO, that basic, core intuitive knowledge of OOP programming can be expanded upon within the same environment, and this learner can make the step up, going from just making balls bounce around the screen to writing a simple rolodex application with the same principles and no code; then make the step to writing database driven webapps with the Seaside webapp framework and the MySQL driver, or even better, the Magma object database.
[1] Not to say that I think OOP is any sort of end-all-be-all, especially as it's imagined to be in the industry. But for someone learning to program at 15 years old right now, real knowledge of OOP would come in handy when they get their first job programming when they turn 20- OOP won't be some ancient COBOLian relic, something you've heard of but no one ever uses.
Squeak isn't all that hard to figure out. But if you're used to having a nicely written book, you can buy one- a couple exist for Squeak specifically. But Squeak's online documentation is lacking, there's no doubt about that- especially in the area of newbie reorientation. Making apps in Squeak is different than making apps in Java, C++ or even Lisp. The environment's different for one.
:P
The basic idea for creating a program in Squeak is to open up the Class Browser. Make a new class. Code away. Depending on what your program does, you may need more than one class.
Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.
It is an (not *the*- anything can be improved) ideal environment for kids- when you've got people teaching them. People used to coding in the same form for a long time often have a hard time learning Squeak. But then again, a lot of old assembly and C hackers have a hard time doing C++ or Java without spending a lot of time thinking about how to design OO systems instead of procedural ones. But old dogs can learn new tricks.
I learned Smalltalk and Squeak on my own, teaching it to myself. I had no problem doing it. Didn't have a text book- or any book, for that matter. While there were even fewer online docs back in those days, that's where I started, but then moving to mostly exploring the system. In Smalltalk, you have the Class Browser, which allows one to browse the source code to anything in the system. I learned by example and by doing. So far, that's how I've learned every language I know, and doing it by just reading books doesn't work for me. When I wanted to know how to make a GUI, I looked at the source of the simplest built-in apps in Squeak, learning how a GUI was constructed. Then making something simple of my own, a simple Address Book. After that point, it's just a matter of checking the reference- that is, looking at the class hierarchy and for the methods that are provided.
I think some personality types don't take well to this kind of exploratory programming, prefering to learn in a more passive way. That's fine- to each her own. Squeak tends to draw folks that do like that style of learning and doing. When it's learned, it is really handy. "Learning" Java for me didn't take that long, and it's mostly a matter of having the on-line class reference handy for me to write a program. In the best case, Squeak would provide more documentation for those who learned to program the old fashioned way, but in any OSS community, no one wants to be the one to write such docs.