Posted by Trygve on Aug 13, 2020; 7:34am
URL: https://forum.world.st/A-Sad-Day-tp5120519.html


Dear All,
Imagine that you bought an iPhone 20 years ago. Over the years, you have filled it with pictures, contacts, and other personal data. You now want to upgrade to iPhone SE and find that all your personal data are lost because there is no way to transfer your data. Very sad.

The same has happened to me with Squeak. The Squeak programs I have written over the past 20 years are effectively lost because I can’t port them to a current version of Squeak. Very sad.

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate to achieve a goal. I retired 20 years ago and made it my task to create DCI (Data-Context-Interaction), a programming paradigm that merges the concepts of class and collaboration. BabyIDE is a non-intrusive Squeak program that includes a model of DCI as well as tools for programming within the paradigm. BabyIDE is a kind of Dynabook, a personal computer for experts in all domains. Its target group could be department managers in business and industry; they are experts in running their department in collaboration with other managers. Another target group could be farmers; they are experts in taking care of their animals. A third target group could be homeowners; they build expertise in controlling their smart home.

Squeak is more than a programming language; it is a live universe of collaborating objects. The shared objects on the web is also a universe of collaborating objects that Kevin Kelly called a single, global machine. BabyIDE extends the Squeak image into this global machine, making all the combined objects available for personal programming as illustrated below:


BabyIDE is now running in Squeak 3.10.2, together with a new Squeak Reverse Engineering tool. I want to port my programs to Squeak 3.5 to benefit from its improved internet communication facilities. This port has been pestering me since April, but the overwhelming complexity of 3.5 has forced me to accept defeat. I can’t avoid speculating about the nature of Squeak’s current target group. It used to be “children of all ages.” Today, it neither includes children nor old Smalltalk hands like me (I wrote my first Smalltalk program in 1978). Stephen Pope, another veteran who also bemoans what is happening to Squeak, wrote in a blog:

“The most popular systems (Squeak and Pharo) both suffer from unbelievable image bloat, with many thousands of classes, hundreds of root classes, class hierarchies with many instance variables in the high-level (abstract) classes, and too many packages with cute but meaningless (to a new-comer) names.”
https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/08/10/smalltalks-successor/

I couldn’t agree more. A few examples:

1.   Class Object defines 485 methods. This means that every Squeak object understands at least 485 messages. Most of them are irrelevant to the problem at hand, but all of them can be part of unexpected behavior. 

2.   The state of every Morph object is held in its regular instance variables PLUS any number of undeclared and undocumented variables in its extension, a Dictionary that may include another dictionary inside it. The Morph class comment: “MorphExtension Allows extra properties to be stored without adding a storage burden to all morphs.” I’m more concerned about the burden put upon the code reader.

3.   For me, the final straw was the new filtering phase added to Squeak’s already complex event handling mechanism. Squeak 3.5 has 208 new methods with ‘filter’ in their name, but there is no indication as to what they are for and when to use them. The abstract concepts of event filtering are documented, but there is no documentation on their reification into concrete code. The complexity of a basically simple mechanism has reached a new high far beyond the capabilities of my brain.

4.   Class MorphicEventDispatcher has 4 methods in 3.10.2 and 16 methods in 5.3.

5.   Class MyMorph>> processEvent: anEvent using: anIgnoredDispatcher
is a regular event handler in 3.10.2. In 5.3, it is a filter, and its execution never stops.

After 60 years in programming, 42 of them in Smalltalk, and the last 20 in Squeak, I have reached the end of my patience and reluctantly have to quit Squeak programming. It is truly a sad day.

Have fun and Goodbye,
--Trygve