Squeak pros and cons from a casual user

Hi,

after going over the weekends diskussions today I can't keep quiet.
There are many things about Squeak Tthat I like and some that make me think
why do I care. First, I have no problem with the UI. I especially like the
old version without rounded corners because it is the fastest.
I would not like to see wx or gtk as part of the base image. I have used wx
with python quite a lot and it takes an awful amount of time to have
something useful with all the defining of frames and menus and...

I like in Squeak the development cycle best now that I understood it. And I
like the way I can do dirty things with living objects just with an
inspector. I have yet to find another IDE/language where this is possible.
The huge range of Morphs for almost anything is fantastic, the time spend
finding the right Morph and understanding its behaviour is horrible. And many
Morphs in a single project make everything really slow but for trying out
ideas I can live with it.

The biggest drawback in Squeak is its instability. It is too easy to crash and
hang Squeak with hanging being easier. Its like Windows 3.0. When I write a
Python program and start it and find out there is an infinite or nearly
infinite loop I kill the program and change the source. In Squeak it means
using CMD-. and hoping I get a usable state again without the loss of data. I
have even corrupted my image by saving at the wrong moment right before the
crash. Crashing and hanging was my first bad impression after seeing the
sweets coloured UI back in 3.2 and have been much more annoying than "non
standard" look and feel whatever "standard" might be.

Cheers, Torsten

Torsten Sadowski puso en su mail :

> The biggest drawback in Squeak is its instability. It is too easy to crash and
> hang Squeak with hanging being easier. Its like Windows 3.0. When I write a
> Python program and start it and find out there is an infinite or nearly
> infinite loop I kill the program and change the source. In Squeak it means
> using CMD-. and hoping I get a usable state again without the loss of data.

Well, I do all kinds of awful experiments with different Squeak versions
(3.7 to 3.9 and my own odd things) and is very rare have a .image crash.

But I on Mac OS X.

I wish you could share you troubles

Edgar



       
       
               
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On 7/10/06, Torsten Sadowski <[hidden email]> wrote:
I don't agree, the development speed is gained trough abstraction
level, squeakgtk and wxsqueak are a simple wrapper around gtk and wx.
In SqueakGtk however i'm trying to give the nearest squeak style to
deal with gtk objects, and creating an application is almost fast as
using Morphs. Also Morphic has its own problems, first of all that's
not user friendly and you won't create applications outside a squeak
context, and that's slower than a Wx/Gtk.

> I like in Squeak the development cycle best now that I understood it. And I
> like the way I can do dirty things with living objects just with an
> inspector. I have yet to find another IDE/language where this is possible.
> The huge range of Morphs for almost anything is fantastic, the time spend
> finding the right Morph and understanding its behaviour is horrible. And many
> Morphs in a single project make everything really slow but for trying out
> ideas I can live with it.
>

If we could anchor this to the previous discussion about Gtk and Wx,
it's possible to create a toolset for them, for example a browser, an
inspect at runtime it's possible. Halos could be toggled as well in
development state and so on...

This depends on how you design your application. Take care to save the
image before doing anything else, and keep an eye on loops... also you
can fork instead of running tests in the UI process. You won't lose
data if you write good code...

> Cheers, Torsten
>

Bye.

--
www.lethalman.net - Thoughts about computer technologies
squeakgtk.pbwiki.com - Searching for developers for Gtk on Smalltalk Squeak

Hi Lethalman,

writing good code is a refinement of writing any code. Humans make errors and
the result of these errors in a stable system should not be catastrophic. I
tried running my calculations forked below the UI Process but this hung the
image all the same. A big problem are unintentional loops. Smalltalk can work
with fractions and some Morphs use these fraction and if they become large
Smalltalk can take virtually ages to complete a calculation.

Edgar, losing the image was luckily just a one time experience which made me
much more cautious. But I do run into the emergency evaluator from time to
time which can come as a shock to a new user. Imagine a kernel panic on the
first day with your bright new Mac.

Cheers, Torsten

Torsten Sadowski skrev:
> Hi Lethalman,
>
> writing good code is a refinement of writing any code. Humans make errors and
> the result of these errors in a stable system should not be catastrophic. I
> tried running my calculations forked below the UI Process but this hung the
> image all the same. A big problem are unintentional loops. Smalltalk can work
> with fractions and some Morphs use these fraction and if they become large
> Smalltalk can take virtually ages to complete a calculation.
>  
The image is a great thing but it can also be a pain in the behind when
you try to find
stray objects and processes out of control etc. There is some real zen
to image hacking that only
a few über geeks are capable of. Building the right tools and sand
boxing for mere mortals would
help. I remember from my brief HyperCard period that you ran it on 5
different levels, from
being able to change the whole stack to being able to just run. The
Squeakland image has a simple
sand boxing but it is still possible to create etoys that recurse out of
control. I believe some kind of
level of safety could be introduced without sacrificing the turtles all
the way down experience.

Karl

Torsten Sadowski puso en su mail :

> Edgar, losing the image was luckily just a one time experience which made me
> much more cautious. But I do run into the emergency evaluator from time to
> time which can come as a shock to a new user. Imagine a kernel panic on the
> first day with your bright new Mac.
>
> Cheers, Torsten
Ok, I could understand.

What Squeak needs is my old dream, the SaveMyDay gizmo.

This should be a image segment incremental what contains your "today" new
created objects.
So , today your start with June9.image and all from here go to June10.seg
(similar to how you could do for projects).
And could have say all from June1.image load for each day of work.

Of course , is only a dream for now.

Edgar



       
       
               
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Hi Edgar,

maybe it would be possible to use Spoon for it. But so far I didn't look at
it.

Cheers, Torsten

Am Montag, 10. Juli 2006 21:02 schrieb Lic. Edgar J. De Cleene: