more of a general smalltalk question

but i'm using squeak as my 'really learn smalltalk' einvironment so...

can any suggest any good reading, books, websites, whatever for  
learning the ins and outs
of how exceptions, signals etc work in smalltalk. i'm interested in  
both an 'end user'
perspective as a start but getting into the nitty gritty of the why of  
the implementation as well.

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Squeak by example helped and still helps me



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>>>>> "Sean" == Sean Allen <[hidden email]> writes:

Sean> but i'm using squeak as my 'really learn smalltalk' einvironment so...
Sean> can any suggest any good reading, books, websites, whatever for learning
Sean> the ins and outs of how exceptions, signals etc work in smalltalk. i'm
Sean> interested in both an 'end user' perspective as a start but getting into
Sean> the nitty gritty of the why of the implementation as well.

For me, the best way to understand the Exception class was to browse it,
browse references to it, and also to the subclasses, especially with something
like Seaside loaded that makes interesting uses of Exceptions to deal with
continuations.  Seeing how it works in practice made it finally go click.

There's no education like source code. :)

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There's no education like source code. :)

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An idea: learning from source code could be documented too by small "how-to".

For instance to understand how sandstonedb works (which is already
well documented thanks to Ramon) we could imagine that:

HOW-TO-LEARNING SDActiveRecord  "file oodb persistency inspired by
ruby activerecord framework"
-restoring persistent objects

"put a self halt in SDActiveRecord class>>warmUp" (wich is called at
startup for activerecord like objects,
"save and quit". then
"start again the image".
This opens a debugger that will help you understand how persistent
objects are restored... Debugger will open on Mock classes that exists
for test reasons. It will also open on all your active records
(subclasses of SDActiveRecord)

etc etc...

This is a small documentation effort that would be precious. We could
also illlustrate with videos which if we had standard tools could be
done without too much effort (I mean less than getting all done with
text only)...

see: http://www.squeaksource.com/SandstoneDb/

My 2 cents ;)

Cédrick

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cdrick wrote

An idea: learning from source code could be documented too by small "how-to".

For instance to understand how sandstonedb works (which is already
well documented thanks to Ramon) we could imagine that:

HOW-TO-LEARNING SDActiveRecord  "file oodb persistency inspired by
ruby activerecord framework"
-restoring persistent objects

"put a self halt in SDActiveRecord class>>warmUp" (wich is called at
startup for activerecord like objects,
"save and quit". then
"start again the image".
This opens a debugger that will help you understand how persistent
objects are restored... Debugger will open on Mock classes that exists
for test reasons. It will also open on all your active records
(subclasses of SDActiveRecord)

etc etc...

This is a small documentation effort that would be precious. We could
also illlustrate with videos which if we had standard tools could be
done without too much effort (I mean less than getting all done with
text only)...

see: http://www.squeaksource.com/SandstoneDb/

My 2 cents ;)

Cédrick

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I strongly agree that the source code must be supplemented with something. GNU Smalltalk has excellent library documentation. Admittedly, in Squeak it's easier to browse the source-code thanks to Squeak's GUI, yet proper documentation would still be a huge boon to development, especially for neophytes.

Furthermore, in Squeak by Example there's this quote by Alan Knight:

   Try not to care. Beginning Smalltalk programmers often
   have trouble because they think they need to understand
   all the details of how a thing works before they can use
   it. This means it takes quite a while before they can
   master Transcript show: 'Hello World'. One of the great leaps
   in OO is to be able to answer the question “How does
   this work?” with “I don’t care”.

We cannot really take that advice seriously if we force users to browse source code whilst building their applications. This is especially detrimental to new users, who generally want to start building applications as soon as possible, and care little about implementation. If they're forced to care about implementation I would guess they'd prefer to use something else, something with better documentation and a rival set of libraries, Python for example.

Can someone please remove me frrom this list ?

---

From: smith02243 <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 8:52 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Newbies] more of a general smalltalk question




cdrick wrote:
I strongly agree that the source code must be supplemented with something.
GNU Smalltalk has excellent library documentation. Admittedly, in Squeak
it's easier to browse the source-code thanks to Squeak's GUI, yet proper
documentation would still be a huge boon to development, especially for
neophytes.

Furthermore, in Squeak by Example there's this quote by Alan Knight:

Try not to care. Beginning Smalltalk programmers often
have trouble because they think they need to understand
all the details of how a thing works before they can use
it. This means it takes quite a while before they can
master Transcript show: 'Hello World'. One of the great leaps
in OO is to be able to answer the question "How does
this work?" with "I don't care".

We cannot really take that advice seriously if we force users to browse
source code whilst building their applications. This is especially
detrimental to new users, who generally want to start building applications
as soon as possible, and care little about implementation. If they're forced
to care about implementation I would guess they'd prefer to use something
else, something with better documentation and a rival set of libraries,
Python for example.
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/more-of-a-general-smalltalk-question-tp18288372p18352304.html
Sent from the Squeak - Beginners mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Gulik.

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Hi,

Is there a way to interrupt the currently evaluating statement sequence
(invoked with "doIt" in a workspace.)?


Thanks.
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Hi Felix,

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 10:10 AM, Felix Dorner <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Is there a way to interrupt the currently evaluating statement sequence
> (invoked with "doIt" in a workspace.)?

try Alt-. (dot). Should give you a debugger.

Best,

Michael
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>  
>> Is there a way to interrupt the currently evaluating statement sequence
>> (invoked with "doIt" in a workspace.)?
>>    
> try Alt-. (dot). Should give you a debugger.
>  
Yep. Thanks a lot.
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