Re: Spreading Smalltalk

 <goran.hultgren <at> bluefish.se> said:
>2. The "development model" is different. People need to learn a few
>things before they understand the image-concept etc. [...] Smallscript
>does that now, but hey - proprietary, non x-platform etc. Not really a
>mass contender IMHO.

- Java startup time is slow as h^Hwell.
- GNU Smalltalk is geared towards scripts
- Smalltalk without the image is, IMHO, not where new people should start.
  Without the image, it's just a nice language - again, IMHO, most of the
  speed increase can be attributed to the image and the development
  environment, not to something particularly nice to the barebones language
  (which, after all, has some serious contenders by now: Python 2.2 and Ruby,
  for example).

>3. Squeak (being the largest "free" Smalltalk) suffers from poor
>documentation. Compared to Python/Ruby it seems very disorganized. In
>reality the code is probably just fine, but good reference documentation
>etc. has been lacking. I think we can do better.

We can do *way* better, but someone seems to have displaced the PIE source
code... 

>4. Even though the syntax is great (I do NOT argue for changing it) it
>might "scare off" newbies initially. On the other hand - a good tutorial
>can teach the syntax in about 3 minutes so I don't really think it's a
>problem. Might be just a myth.
>
I think it's a myth. But an important one to dispell.