Re: Why Images Bother People (or, at least me)

[David Farber <address@hidden>]

At 09:26 AM 6/12/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>One reason I don't particularly care for the whole "image" concept is
>that it seems overly monolithic.  You can't make use of a small
>language core that only loads resources it needs for the job at hand
>-- you load the whole 50 Meg image, whether you want to access a
>database or play MPEG movies, or just print "Hello, World!".

An image is nothing more and nothing less than a full memory dump that can be restarted from where it left off. It is true that, for Squeak, your only option is to re-invoke the image (which is actually really fast), but this is not true of other smalltalks. Smalltalk/X, for example, will read source files (and JIT the code) on startup if there is no image.

>The second thing I dislike is that my experience is that these
>environments don't interact very well with the outside world.  For
>example, I've played with Squeak a bit and dislike how I don't really
>have the ability to use an editing environment I'm comfortable with,
>rather than the Object browser.  Sure, I *should* use the object
>browser, but I'm stubborn -- I don't want to.  I didn't want to have
>to create new key bindings to make the browser act the way I wanted.

Emacs users scorn other, random text editors for the same reason that the creators of Squeak scorn text editors in general: both Emacs and Smalltalk are extremely powerful and completely unmatched in capability once you know how to use their power.

>-Brent

david -- pitching in so Avi doesn't have to defend the faith alone! ;)

--
David Farber
dfarber@numenor.com