[geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, November 15, 2002 at 01:03:19 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.
>
> No, I don't really care for Tk either, though I put up with it
> sometimes, like in STk.  

Worse is that it looks like BLOX actually spits out tcl which is fed to
an embedded tcl/tk engine.  Yuck!

> I do like applications to look like they belong and play nicely with
> other native applications.  So, to me, that means that languages on Mac
> OS X should use Cocoa, Windows applications should use MFC, and linux
> applications (as well as freebsd, netbsd, etc) should use Gnome, KDE, or
> something related, for at least parts of the program.

In this context Smalltalk isn't a "language" per se.  It's much more
akin to something that should look completely standard on all platforms.

> And most of all, all languages need to be able to access sockets, pipes,
> and opengl, in my book.  I don't care to invest real heavily if
> languages that don't support all of those.  And I have higher hopes of
> low level access from GST than I do from 

squeak?  Squeak has all those things and more (OpenGL in 3.1).  It also
has decent ability to embed any C code (i.e. arbitrary libraries).

No smalltalk seems to have a decent SNMP library embedded yet though.
I'd really love to tinker with SNMP management tools in smalltalk.

> I don't get what you mean by gst is a fringe implementation.  Aren't
> pretty much all smalltalks on the fringe?

Hey now!  You'd better watch what you say!  Them's near fight'in words!

>  gst seems less fringe like
> than little smalltalk or pocket smalltalk

In the smalltalk world only pocket smalltalk is less "fringe" because
its target environment intrigues many smalltalk people.

> and other than squeak, there
> aren't any other free smalltalks.  

I think all of the major "commercial" implementations are free for all
non-commercial and academic use.  Certainly all of Cincom's stuff is, as
is IBM's VisualAge, and eXept's smalltalk/X is freely available too.
Unfortunately only Cincom goes much beyond M$-Windoze and GNU Linux x86.

> Basically, while I find squeak some fun, gst seems more like something I
> could write real applications in more than squeak does.  That is the
> only reason I pay any attention to it.

I still think you've got that completely backwards.  If anything Squeak
is far closer to being "industrial quality" than GNU Smalltalk.  Disney
are even using Squeak in production applications.

> Well, my kernel recompile is done, so I need to reboot rather than
> spending longer recompiling.

You know once you reboot you could keep on compiling stuff.  Unix has
this wonderful multi-tasking ability....  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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