Dependence on Programming Experts

Rodney Somerstein rodneys at io.com
Thu Jul 6 03:02:41 EDT 2006


>My take is that Rev is not likely to be an easy, malleable environment in
>which to create the kinds of things your obviously fertile mind is already
>dreaming up, let alone the things that will spring forth from those already
>rich ideas.
>
>Just my opinion, of course, but I think you'd find more shoulders on which
>to stand (i.e., components, objects, concepts, tools) over in Smalltalkland
>than you will in RevWorld.

Wow! We couldn't differ more on this opinion, Dan. For someone who 
doesn't want to do much programming, Smalltalk is probably not the 
environment to go to. Environments such as Squeak will require him to 
program pretty much everything. No nice graphical starting point the 
way there is in Rev. And, it is REALLY unintuitive to anyone who 
hasn't drunk the Smalltalk Cool Aid. Just figuring out what mouse 
clicks do takes some work. Smalltalk is essentially an operating 
system.

No I will give you the object oriented nature of things in the 
Smalltalk world. That is really the one place that it really excels. 
But when it comes to anything else other than object oriented 
programming, which isn't his goal, I wouldn't steer anyone to 
Smalltalk.

If some of the Smalltalk folks could create a nice environment that 
makes it easy to target a variety of OS platforms, I might be 
convinced otherwise. However, the only attempts that I've seen tend 
to be very pricey and still result in Smalltalk-like, rather than 
familiar, environments to work in.

The truth is, what this person wants to do will require programming. 
Rev is probably the friendliest environment currently available to 
get going with. In part, due to the the nice folks on this mailing 
list. RealBASIC might give it a run for the money as it has some 
pretty rabid, helpful users as well. Not as cross-platform or quite 
as easy to use, but still another place to steer a developer 
wanna-be. And he is a developer wanna-be. He just doesn't know it or 
want to admit it yet. ;-)

-Rodney



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