2014-06-30 13:15 GMT-03:00 Dale Henrichs <dale.henri...@gemtalksystems.com>: > Smalltalk with it's heavy reliance on GUI-based tools is not quite as easy > to customize (for several reasons) ... before knickers get knotted, please > keep in mind that I think that customizable GUI-based tools are important, > it's just that the GUI raises the entry level bar a bit higher than it needs > to be... > > There is room in Smalltalk for plain old-fashioned scripts (workspaces don't > quite cut it in this regard) that can be easily shared and customized (and > written in Smalltalk) ... > > anway, some (breakfast) food for thought...
This is, in my opinion, a flaw that affects any system born as a GUI. There was no CLI culture in the past. It happens to Smalltalk, obviously, and also affected Microsoft (another UI centric OS) who had to put a lot of effort (and $$$) to add command line support for most of their solutions, as a response to devops and similar users. Mac got developer traction since they put BSD underneath a fancy GUI. According to the Unix Philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) Smalltalk, and Pharo, are compliant with the "Rule of Modularity" whitin the image, but not with the "Rule of composition" as seen from external programs. Pharo's command line support is certainly better than before. But we're not there yet, when even web pages are mostly composed/scaffolded/provisioned using CLI tools today instead of using behemont tools like Dreamweaver/Expression. This is also food for thought. In case anybody is still hungry. :) Regards!
