[Cuis-dev] teaching Cuis with 7.7

[Robert Chifflet]

i am a long-retired Smalltalk developer from back in Digitalk who worked
later mostly in VisualWorks and VisualAge in USA, but more in Dolphin for
myself until Roel Wuyts began adding rules engine to Squeak. I also took an
interest in early Seaside versus Aida.

today i am teaching my brilliant grand-child Etoys and DrGeo.

But when we go to Cuis itself, we hit many walkbacks.

For example:

the UI has a Help on World menu with a selection label

ClassCommentBrowser.

Unlike TerseGuide,

it requires manually loading package 'ClassCommentBrowser'

which use of

Feature require:

will fail.

I do not see such a package at GitHub.

I mention this because many other slightly deeper explorations also fail.

We inspect newly opened Text Editor and i say look for a class >>open method

TextEditor window inspect revealed that it is merely a SystemWindow, but in
practice the obvious

>>open...

class methods will fail.

ONLY

SystemWindow editText: label: wrap:

 will open on a (TextModel withText: 'Hello World')

but with that required label:  and with
wrap: false

The simplicity of having a World item 'Open | Text Editor' be a
SystemWindow is defeated if the class methods for >>open will fail on a
TextModel, right ?

Or am i mistaken ?

But why should >>buildMorphicWindow

fail on a TextModel  if a TextEditor is a SystemWindow ?

And this comes simply from inspect model and inspect morph from the top
item offered the student by the World ...

To me it is obvious that a TextEditor is not a SystemWindow, but that is my
non-Cuis background showing maybe ...

Am i hitting a transition out of 7.6 ?

Which Cuis image is stable for showing a young person  who likes Dr Geo ?

To me, if TextEditor from the World is a SystemWindow, the latter must
implement the class methods

>>editTextModel: aTextModel

or

>>editPlainText: aString

and then have the defaults such as

label: 'Text Editor'
wrap: true

and then let the ab initio student discover the full method

>>editText: label: wrap:

otherwise simplicity is making simple exploratory learning too complex.

Note that >>new is no help here as SystemWindow has no edit text methods on
instance side.


i tell my grandChild to look for >>open or >>openOn: methods for the class
they discovered and there it is

>>open

But what is worse, label is set to nil, so that one step deeper they hit
far too soon a nil check when that will surely provoke more nil checks just
to prevent updates to an empty String. But an always empty string should
never show up as dirty. And adding checks for nil is the very last thing i
want to show someone new to Smalltalk.


But i am too old for much more than this ... and i am probably wrong, but
exasperated that Cuis is not so simple for a very bright student.

The documentation is very out of date ... a 50 year old issue for a 5 year
old project ?  Can the docs better reflect which stable release they were
validated against ? Can an undergraduate do that task as a project in CS
900, "Intro to Documentation" ?

i do try for some humour ...

thanks

robert

G.Robert Shiplett
Canada
français ou Deutsch

PS

my Spanish is now very poor, and my Japanese is a struggle: but i can
translate Spanish if you like. I stopped using Russian in 2022 , because i
spent 2 years in a Ukrainian town.  I should have stopped in 2014. I worry
about Argentina's Public universities ... we have some issues here, too,
sad to say ... with a liberal government no better than the Conservative
government before it. Change can be disappointing.
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