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

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

> Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 13:16:35 -0700
> From: Steve Dekorte <steve@dekorte.com>
> 
> On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 10:38 AM, Avi Bryant wrote:
> > However, there is a focus in the Squeak community on portability (one 
> > of
> > the major contributors, for example, works exclusively on an Acorn
> > machine), and so people have a very strong tendency to reimplement 
> > things
> > in Squeak rather than relying on external tools or libraries.  This can
> > have big payoffs - moving a multimedia-heavy app from Linux to Windows 
> > to
> > Mac OS X to Mac OS 9 to WinCE handhelds, and having it run
> > pixel-identically on each, has been a pretty convincing sell in the 
> > past.
> 
> If you're talking about multimedia things like audio/video 
> encoding/decoding, the libraries that do those things are often ANSI C 
> and quite portable. If you're talking about rendering, then you need to 
> really need to use the graphics and sound hardware to get good 
> performance and that (realistically) involves using C too.
> 

I guess the ideal would be a system that would use a C library for speed if
it was available, but if not would use a library written in its own
language (here, Smalltalk).

On this topic, I've never understood why Smalltalkers haven't put more time
into writing a decently scriptable syntax for Smalltalk.  I know there have
been some efforts in this direction (SmallScript, for instance), but GNU
Smalltalk, for instance, uses the "Green Book" syntax for filing out code,
which is minimal but not terribly writer-friendly (all those exclamation
marks get on my nerves).  This ties in to the only-in-an-image philosophy;
if you never edit files directly, this isn't an issue.

Mike