[geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, November 14, 2002 at 16:41:18 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.
>
> In my opinion Squeak is cool, but it is also seriously overwhelming.
> Their focus seems to no longer be a reasonably small OO language to
> being an extremely bleeding edge multimedia development system.

Open an old-style "MVC" project and welcome yourself to plain old
Smalltalk-80.

You can't get much simpler than having the exact same environment and
object classes that were released over 20 years ago.  :-)

>  It
> comes with insane amounts of stuff included, from 3D animation tools, to
> speach synthesizers, to all sorts of education stuff (for young kids), a
> lip syncing system, web server, a wiki system, video IO, audio IO, music
> synthesis, and on and on and on.  The short of it is that Squeak isn't a
> simple language, but rather it is Alan Kays playground.

The _language_ in all parts of Squeak is still _exactly_ the same.
Squeak just has lots of new object classes which make it useful and
interesting in a modern computing context.  I showed it to a young
fellow who had been working on a game in C++ for a school project and he
was complaining about how slow C++ was and how difficult it was and how
much damn ugly code he had to write.  He refused to believe that all the
Squeak demos I showed him were running from an interpreter -- it was
just too far out of his sphere of experience that he was sure it was
either black magic or that I was lying through my teeth.  When I told
him that there really wasn't much new in Squeak in the last 20 years
except the colour support and portability to many new host systems as
well as some new object classes he was completely speechless.

Yes, you can get lost playing with the toys in Squeak.  Don't do that!  ;-)

(note:  I don't always practice what I preach -- the toys are FUN! :-)

> I have a half started project or two in Squeak, but for generally
> fiddling, and for general increased likely hood of getting something
> done, I'd look to GNU Smalltalk.  It is under active development, even
> though it manages to appear like it isn't.  I wish 2.0.8 would come out.
> It adds better Solaris and Irix support (meaning that it is supposed to
> fix the immediate bus errors ones gets on those platforms). The hold up
> seem to be a machine failure on the part of the lead maintainer.  

I would definitely _NOT_ recommend GNU Smalltalk.  It's pretty bare-bones
and has none of the really necessary bits of the interactive development
environment.  GNU Smalltalk is really only useful for dire GNU zealots
who have a Smalltalk itch to scratch.  Anyone new to smalltalk and OO
won't get very much done in GNU Smalltalk at all unless they're
dedicated beyond all reasonable expectations.


> However, those languages don't tend to reveal how mind blowing OO can be
> as quickly as smalltalk does.

On that we agree 101%!  ;-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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