Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[Geoffrey Knauth <address@hidden>]

Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com> writes at 19:38 11-Jun-2003 -0700:
> The thing is that I wouldn't consider Smalltalk a Language for the 
> Masses
> - although it's great for children and others with uncorrupted minds, 
> it's
> a struggle to break hardened developers free of their addictions to 
> emacs
> and edit/compile/run cycles, and get them comfortable with a real 
> object
> environment.

I'm a hardened Emacs addict, and happy user of Smalltalk & Squeak.

The only thing that ever made me nervous about Smalltalk environments 
was the notion that if you screwed something up, you could end up with 
an image that was damaged, and if you didn't know how to Undo your 
mistake or restore a previous state, you might be fearful of tinkering, 
which is the whole point of the environment.

When I think about it, newcomers to Emacs too (and many other pieces of 
software) are fearful of the damage they may inflict, until they are 
taught how to fix mistakes, or return to a previous known state, at 
which point they cast away fear and launch full speed ahead with 
experimentation.

Geoffrey
--
Geoffrey S. Knauth | http://knauth.org/gsk