"Mathew Ray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > I am quite platform-agnostic, but I do like the premise of Open-Source > software. The Squeak language is something I have come across over the years > and it seems to be steadily developing into a Director-like tool but with > many, many more advantages. Imagine Director that was opensource, editable, > and recompilable...
These are not necessarily advantages! > If we don't like how Macromedia is doing things, then > hey, we can go create our own module to plug into it and add functionality > (kind of like Xtras, but all the way down to the fundamental App level). > Also interesting is that Alan Kay is one of the people behind squeak, > ironically enough. Perhaps squeak is his solution for Apple and MS making > BILLIONS off of his team's ideas. Alan Kay was hired by Apple fro a long time. Apple is one of the prime movers behind Squeak, as is Disney, which is where Alan Kay has been working, although I think he's no longer there now. What interests me in squeak is the potential to make a child's laptop computer - sort of a mini iBook - running Squeak as the operating system. (The original smalltalk project was designed to make computers accessible to children). I'm sure this was partly Disney's interest, but as it's not a surefire money spinner, nothing commercial has happened in that area. A PDA running squeak would be great. (I think there are miniature squeak VMs for palmOS, and doubtless for windowsCE too). Another interesting thing about squeak is that (even now) it closely resembles the original Xerox GUI that Steve Jobs famously nicked from PARC. Some of the GUI ideas, like scrollbars which only appear when you move the mouse over the edge of a document, are interesting, but flawed. Apple really made some good improvements on its useability for the Macintosh but they also totally missed the point of all the OOP stuff and have never really been able to integrate it decently at the OS level since. > Anyway, be sure to check it out at: > > http://www.squeak.org/index.html > > The virtual machine is a lot like Java, but MUCH MUCH faster and Squeak is > also completely PLATFORM INDEPENDANT. Makes sense to me...now they just need > to get 200 million people to download the virual machine :0) Build something great and people will come! Most of the stuff I've seen in Squeak is very rough-edged. Click the wrong thing and you get the development tools opening. Oops! Not very child-friendly. :) That said, it *is* a nice little diversion. I wouldn't say it was Director-like, by any stretch of the imagination. It's more of a mini-OS than a virtual machine in the sense of Java. I don't think it's particularly easy to start programming with it because Smalltalk is so religiously pure (and quirky), still it would be nice to think that, even if this thread arose out of petty bickering, some folks ended up looking at Squeak and digging it. [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
