Hi, another 2 cents. Albeit I agree with what Keith writes, I doubt it's really just marketing. I believe that is true for practitioners, for whom I do not have any experience. I do have some experience with students, though, both at undergraduate and graduate level.
Students have mostly accepted it as a powerful programming language and appreciated its elegance and simplicity, and the standard library's strength. They have objected to three things: dynamic typing, access control, and the image. Dynamic typing... well, once they were shown how programming works in a Smalltalk environment (incremental application development, debugging, inspecting, ...), they got over that. They even accepted that message parameters' types are "declared" using naming conventions. ;-) Access control... again, once they were introduced to the idioms, it went better, though some of them still had a bad feeling in the stomach. They agreed with member variables being private by default, but they objected to all messages being public. The image... *that* I could not fully convince them of so far. Maybe it's my fault. If anybody has a great convincing collection of slides, I'd love to see it. - Anyway, I have the feeling that what they disliked most about it was that the concept of "compilation unit" or "unit of execution" is not as definite as in, say, Java, which they know better. Best, Michael _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
