Re: Re: Rails and Seaside

On 1/13/06, Yanni Chiu <yanni@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Stability? In over 5 years, I've only had an image crash,
or have had to kill the image at most a dozen times.

Sorry, that's not what happened to me :(

I use Squeak in Linux, and I had some inexplicable crashes (usually caused by the UI I think).
I cannot reproduce them :( that's why I never filled a  bug report about it. (maybe the windows/mac version is more stable).
When I talk about "annoying" bugs, I refer mainly that some times (at least to me) the debugger pops-up without an apparent reason, that doesn't prevents me to continue using Squeak (some times I try to look in the stack to see what happened... and some times I just forget it and continue with my work) but I think that from the point of view of a newcomer this is ugly.

I'm pretty ignorant about the internals of the architecture... but when I browse the morphic/ui/kernel classes, I think "mmm this is full of spaghetti code".
For example the last week I was  trying to fix the "splitter" bug in 3.9... and I give up. Having objects is not enough, you can also make a unmaintainable program with a lot of Boolean flags... using the True/False object :P (just browse references to Preferences to see examples). I think that most of those small bugs are a consequence of "spaghetti" code.

Usability? I've gotten used to the way things work. In fact,
I often find other Smalltalks lack Squeak's features.

Usability is not about features, and yes there is a lot of features.
But give Squeak to a newcomer, and to the non-standard UI add small things like:
- menus are full of options without an "intention revealing" title/or sequence of actions, i.e: if you copy a morph to the "paste buffer"... where is the "paste" option? (it takes me a lot to figure that is "World->new morph->from paste buffer").
- default keys are not mapped in a standard way (in Linux, the default is to use Alt, instead of Ctrl for saving and cut/paste), yes you can configure it in preferences... but now try to find where is the option
- the standard pop-up menus with the "Changes not saved...OK to cancel changes?"..."Yes/No".. why not simple a "Save/Cancel" (like in Mac dialog boxes).

I know that these are small things, but if we are talking about attracting developers to use Squeak and Seaside, we have to look in those small things.

(after writing down this list.. I think.."oh I'm a little stupid, why I just don't fill bugs/wish reports instead of writing this in an email".. yup)

Here's a common situation with ENVY, which can happen if
you don't save your image often enough. You create a new
application after your last save. After an image crash,
you have no indication you need to load that application.
(If you had added the application to a configuration map,
upon creating it, then you would have a simple re-load.)
The bottomline is that you have to save your image often,
to make recovery easier - whether you have the changes file
or ENVY.

Yes you are right.

Maybe I was too critic about Squeak. The platform has a lot of work, and is good in many aspects... 
But I want a better open-source St. been critic is just the starting point :)
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