[toronto-lisp] Smalltalk TV and Toronto Smalltalk Group

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Rudolf Olah <omouse at gmail.com> wrote:
> Apparently the Toronto Smalltalk Group has put together something called
> Smalltalk TV. I just spotted the article in Dr Dobb's Journal
>
>    http://www.ddj.com/architect/220100617
>
> And the website itself:
>
>    http://www.smalltalktelevision.com/

I hope this means Chris Cunnington is moving from being excited at the
possibilities of Smalltalk to being excited at what he's doing with
it.

The last I'd heard, it was much more the former.

I have long found Smalltalk to be interesting in concept, but
excruciatingly painful in practice, as the whole "objects all the way
down" model means you have to build a whole infrastructure in order to
get *anything* to work.  That is, you have to figure out the
integration between the little "hello_cruel_world" method I'm trying
to create and the entirety of the Smalltalk environment.

If the *only* Lisps in existence were Lisp machines, then Lisp might
suffer the same.

It doesn't; I can easily run a REPL on pretty well any sort of system
(newer than a Z-80 :-)) and I don't generally need to figure out the
whole "Lisp environment" in order to load a bit of Lisp from a file on
my filesystem.

Genera always sounded cool, but it might be the same scary integration
process as fighting to get accustomed to Squeak.

Every couple of years, I install Squeak briefly, amaze myself that the
web browser gets out of the VM into the network, and then promptly
turf it because I haven't the patience to struggle thru realigning all
my thought processes to use *their* editor and *their* class manager
and so forth.

A couple years ago, other Chris did a talk for TLUG on how exciting
the Seaside framework was; unfortunately, doing simple stuff like
"where do I serve up some bits of static content" seemed about as
difficult as the wacky dynamic stuff that's hard to conceptualize.
The "hello world" bit was too much to explain in an hour, and there's
something bad when that's the case.
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