[geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 09:56:07PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Yeah, BLOX.  To quote the manual:  "It is an abstraction on top of the a
> platform's native GUI toolkit that is common across all platforms.
> Writing to the Blox interface means your GUI based application will be
> portable to any platform where Blox is supported."  and there's a a
> traditional 4-pane class browser written in Blox.  It is currently Tk
> based, but as you mentione supposedly there's also the beginnings of a
> GTk+ variant too.
> 
> I'm a bit of a purist and I really don't like any of these smalltalks
> that have their GUI classes acting as fronts to some underlying graphics
> toolkit (and though Tk has done wonders for giving lots of things GUI
> capabilities, I really don't like Tk at all).  Of course that puts
> VisualAge and most of the other commercial versions in the same state
> from my perspective.  Until Squeak came along there was only one true
> implementation! ;-)  (ParcPlace, aka VisualWorks)

No, I don't really care for Tk either, though I put up with it
sometimes, like in STk.  

I do like applications to look like they belong and play nicely with
other native applications.  So, to me, that means that languages on Mac
OS X should use Cocoa, Windows applications should use MFC, and linux
applications (as well as freebsd, netbsd, etc) should use Gnome, KDE, or
something related, for at least parts of the program.  If it makes
sense, not everything needs to be done in the native toolkit, but ideal
Drag and drop should work correctly, and things like file dialogs should
use the standard, and so on.  All those things mean needing to be able
to call native classes.  Further more, some applications should look
completely standard (like, I wish Mozilla did, even though I don't care
that Emacs and wings don't, though wings does use Microsoft's file
dialogs on windows).

And most of all, all languages need to be able to access sockets, pipes,
and opengl, in my book.  I don't care to invest real heavily if
languages that don't support all of those.  And I have higher hopes of
low level access from GST than I do from 
 
> However the biggest problem I have with GNU Smallktalk, I guess, is that
> from the Smalltalk world's perspective, it's _really_ out there (not as
> out-there as little-smalltalk, of course :-).  I.e. it's a fringe
> implementation.  Squeak is in some ways a fringe implementation too, but
> at least in the smalltalk circles around here it's nowhere near as far
> out as GST.  The good thing of course is that GST and Squeak are both
> more or less ANSI compatible.

I don't get what you mean by gst is a fringe implementation.  Aren't
pretty much all smalltalks on the fringe?  gst seems less fringe like
than little smalltalk or pocket smalltalk, and other than squeak, there
aren't any other free smalltalks.  

Basically, while I find squeak some fun, gst seems more like something I
could write real applications in more than squeak does.  That is the
only reason I pay any attention to it.
 
> Right now version 2.0.3 is what's in NetBSD's pkgsrc and I've been lazy
> and have only tried to build it from pkgsrc and it won't build, not even
> on i386 and not even with GCC-2.95.3 (which is also in pkgsrc).  I
> should probably try harder -- I do want to experiment with the emacs
> interface and see if that encourages me to do more coding in smalltalk
> -- but I've not had the time yet to fart around with it "by hand" and
> get it working....

There is supposedly a 2.0.7, but darned if I can find it.  I didn't have
any trouble building it on Irix.  I just can run what gets built.  I
also didn't have any trouble building (or running) it on linux/x86.

> BTW, released today:
> 
> -rw-r--r--    1 1022     101       2918519 Nov 14 23:33 smalltalk-2.0.8.tar.gz
> 
> (maybe I should try to update the pkgsrc module...)

Interesting, since I was just emailing the maintainer about it today and
he said it wouldn't be availabe quite yet.  He also said it was exactly
what I needed to get it on Sparc, and was probably what I needed for
Irix, so I'll have to download it soon.

Well, my kernel recompile is done, so I need to reboot rather than
spending longer recompiling.

--
Joshua D. Boyd