a convert to Seaside

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Sun Feb 18 20:30:25 UTC 2007


On Saturday 17 February 2007, Yanni Chiu wrote:
> D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> > [No, not me.]
> >
> > This blog entry looks interesting and relevant to the topic of
> > this week's TLUG talk.  "MY Full-Circle Jouney Back to Smalltalk"
> >
> > http://kentreis.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/my-full-circle-journey-b
> >ack-to-smalltalk/
>
> How was the talk?

Unfortunately, I couldn't attend due to prior commitments. Had I found 
out about it earlier, I might have been able to do something about 
that.

> What do people think of Smalltalk and Seaside?

I've looked at Smalltalk and really wanted to like it because I have 
great respect for its creator but I couldn't get past the weirdness 
of the environment. I care about deployment issues so I'm not 
enthusiastic about deploying something on a server that requires VNC, 
or some such thing, in order to manage it. I'm also not enthusiastic 
about any environment that requires me to use a specific IDE or 
specific tools, especially one as weird and anachronistic as Squeak. 
I've worked with such a tool for a long time and after having made 
the switch to open source languages, like Python, I see using 
something like Squeak Smalltalk a major step backwards, even if 
Smalltalk is a more "pure" OO language. I can use any number of IDEs 
with Python but I am not forced to. I can (and do) use vim, Kate, or 
whatever text editor is at hand. I can use tools like grep, diff, 
Subversion on Python source. With Smalltalk, I can't leverage any of 
those familiar tools. I would need to find replacements for and 
relearn, well, just about everything. It is not obvious that effort 
would be worthwhile.

In some respects, what I wrote above sounds very much like what PHP 
folks say about Python and Ruby so I admit that it is entirely 
possible that just like they miss the point of Python and Ruby 
because they don't know any better, I'm missing the point of Seaside 
and Smalltalk because I don't know any better. Perhaps there is some 
magic moment where the supposed advantages of Smalltalk becomes real 
and that I haven't encountered that moment yet.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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