First impressions

[albanread]

I have just started exploring Strongtalk again and I find the type
checking features of Strongtalk really helpful; the type checker
alerts you to silly mistakes when you accept a change.
Also the user interface for browsing around the system is really very
good and easy to understand. There is always a danger with graphical
interfaces that they will force you to enter text into tiny little
boxes and prevent you from seeing the bigger picture.
I think the outliner view avoids that trap while still lending useful
structure to things.

The version on the main site (the 2.0 release) has been quite
unreliable (unusably so for me.)
It might be worth replacing it now, with a link to the current version
which seems much better.

[talksmall]

On Aug 28, 6:27 pm, albanread <albanr...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I have just started exploring Strongtalk again and I find the type
> checking features of Strongtalk really helpful;  the type checker
> alerts you to silly mistakes when you accept a change.

I think the optional type descriptions in Strongtalk are a very useful
form of documentation. They are helpfully descriptive when present,
but since they are optional, they can be omitted in contexts where the
type is unknown, not yet specified or just unwanted.

> Also the user interface for browsing around the system is really very
> good and easy to understand. There is always a danger with graphical
> interfaces that they will  force you to enter text into tiny little
> boxes and prevent you from seeing the bigger picture.
> I think the outliner view avoids that trap while still lending useful
> structure to things.
>
> The version on the main site (the 2.0 release) has been quite
> unreliable (unusably so for me.)
> It might be worth replacing it now, with a link to the current version
> which seems much better.

Good point. Rather than link to a specific version, though, I think it
would be more useful to link to the Downloads tab in general. The
latest version will change from time to time and it would be helpful
not to have to update external links every time it changes.

talksmall

[Gilad Bracha]

Alban

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:24 PM, talksmall <stephe...@googlemail.com> wrote:

On Aug 28, 6:27 pm, albanread <albanr...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I have just started exploring Strongtalk again and I find the type
> checking features of Strongtalk really helpful;  the type checker
> alerts you to silly mistakes when you accept a change.

I'm glad you like it.  I wish we had had time to finish this work, and capitalize on it (e.g., to provide name completion which we had considered back in the mid-90s).  

> Also the user interface for browsing around the system is really very
> good and easy to understand. There is always a danger with graphical
> interfaces that they will  force you to enter text into tiny little
> boxes and prevent you from seeing the bigger picture.
> I think the outliner view avoids that trap while still lending useful
> structure to things.

The outliners in Strongtalk were inspired by Self.  Again, I'm glad you appreciate them. Since then, we've had the opportunity to evolve the idea a good deal: check out Vassili Bykov's Hopscotch browsers in Newspeak (http://newspeaklanguage.org). 

The strength of the outliner approach is that avoids the pain of dealing with many panes and tabs, which you hit in mainstream tools like Eclipse, VisualStudio etc. It's downside is tha the number of windows can get large (just like in the OS' GUI - hence docking bars etc).  Hopscotch solves both problems rather nicely.

--
Cheers, Gilad