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From: warner@scubed.com (Ken Warner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Interface Builders?
Message-ID: <503@scubed.SCUBED.COM>
Date: 20 Dec 90 00:32:08 GMT
References: <1386@autodesk.COM> <502@scubed.SCUBED.COM> <MORSE.90Dec18115242@quark.mpr.ca>
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In article <MORSE.90Dec18115242@quark.mpr.ca> morse@quark.mpr.ca (Daryl Morse) writes:
>In article <502@scubed.SCUBED.COM> warner@scubed.com (Ken Warner) writes:
>[lots of stuff deleted]
><For a programmer, the leap to Smalltalk from conventional procedure
><oriented languages is too great.  
[etc]

>Having recently made the leap from "conventional procedure oriented"
>languages to Smalltalk, I will confess that it was non-trivial.
>Furthermore, I agree that training costs *are* not insignificant.
>However, to suggest that a leap to C++ would have been any less costly
>is very misleading. 

[stuff about different implementations deleted]

For the sake of discussion: Are the differences between language and
environment a little blurred here?  There are two separate tasks here:
Learning the language and learning the environment.  This holds for both C++
and Smalltalk.

When I became a Smalltalk programmer, the hardest thing to get a gut feeling for
was the message passing paradigm.  Once I grasped that, the syntax of the 
language was fairly simple.  However, becomming familiar with all the nooks and 
crannies of the environment still consumes me.  

>C++ ended up with a syntax that IMHO, is kludgy, complex, and very difficult to
>learn. 

Are you talking about the language or the implementation? Would the Objectworks 
version of C++ made learning C++ less of an effort?  More of an effort?

>Having been a user of 4.0 for some months, I am not ambivalent toward
>it. 4.0 is a much improved product over its predecessor.

How so?

>The browsers and other user interfaces are all very usable, albeit,
>with a few little quirks. 

What quirks?

>Having separate windows is very useful if
>you normally do other things while you are running ST80. If you want
>to run more than one copy of ST80 at the same time, which we do often,
>having separate windows is a necessity.

This is interesting...could you elaborate?

Ken Warner