Squeak
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Carl Watts
Last updated at 1:58 pm UTC on 23 November 2000
Carl started working in Smalltalk in Smalltalk-80 v2.x and didn't like it at first. The user interface was awful. It was made by and for Smalltalk experts (who didn't need labels in the browser to tell them what all those lists were for) but was very difficult for a novice to decipher.

But Carl has a tireless curiousity and determination to reverse-engineer what the creators of this software must have been thinking.

The light came. These people were genius!

So after writing new programming tools that were usable to expert Smalltalk programmers (as he'd become) as well as for novice users, Carl began programming in Smalltalk with a vengence.

After Smalltalk-80 2.5, ParcPlace next released Objectworks 4.0 and it was at this point Carl realized he had to go to ParcPlace and put them back on the right path: convince them not to attempt OS-Integration (as in Objectworks 4.0) but instead keep the entirely Smalltalk based graphics/imaging/windows system they used previously.

Carl joined ParcPlace in 1991 but failed in his prime mission in the four years he was there, the momentum of Objectworks 4.0 and later Visualworks was too great. But he hopes he created some well-engineered contributions to Objectworks and Visualworks while he was there.

Carl was immensely pleased when Squeak was released. It was on the right path. And Squeak is now in so many ways much better than ParcPlace Smalltalk and getting better much faster due to the large community of public domain developers contributing to it.

In his next life Carl hopes to find time to contribute more to the Squeak project and to create "Smalltalk LITE". Smalltalk LITE would be derived from Squeak only with:
  1. much of the cruft that has collected over the decades (like dust bunnies) in the system classes removed (Carl did this once before for Smalltalk-80 2.5)
  2. the interaction between some basic objects simplied (remove DependentsFields for example)
  3. a slightly cleaned up and simplified version of Squeak's imaging model
  4. a simplified version of Squeak's Morphs called Morphs Lite
  5. a new set of standard views (aka widgets) based on Morphs Lite in a new desktop-like interface metaphor Carl created called Gerzo inspired by the artwork of artist Gunther Gerzo.
  6. and with the new programming tools Carl created long ago that support novice users and gurus alike in a framework that helps both create well engineered Smalltalk code



For more about Carl see his main web pages.