a convert to Seaside

[Yanni Chiu]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

IMHO, it's a matter of what you first encountered that
determines what feels wierd. Consider someone who has
only ever worked in the MS Windows GUI. Would a DOS prompt
or UNIX shell prompt feel "wierd" to the GUI-only person.
Command-line vs. GUI - there are arguments for both sides.
People get conditioned to think the other is wierd.

 > 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.

You don't have to use VNC to manage it. You can run it
completely "headless", then it'll be just like any other
daemon process. The ability to hook up a VNC interface is
a huge advantage over something like a remote debugger port.
You'll be able to access the entire running process in the
exact same manner you had when you were developing the code.

 > 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.

That's a common reaction, and understandable. Lots of
newcomers are at a loss without their familiar file manipulation
tools. But, in a Smalltalk image you don't manipulate your objects
indirectly through files - you manipulate them directly, using the
GUI/IDE that is inseparable from what is the Smalltalk experience.
People eventually adjust, likely because the benefits are worth
the change in habits. BTW, very occasionally I've exported the
Smalltalk source code to a file, and used VI to do some gross edits
(e.g. rename prefixes) - but most of the time, the Smalltalk tools
are the easier way.

> Perhaps there is some 
> magic moment where the supposed advantages of Smalltalk becomes real 
> and that I haven't encountered that moment yet.

That's the prevaling thinking. I wouldn't know, since I encountered
Smalltalk before I wrote a lot of code in C/Pascal-like languages
(so I was never trapped into a narrow mindset that a computer
programming language and environment had to consist of file editing
and compiling).

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