[Cuis-dev] teaching Cuis with 7.7

[Benoit St-Jean]

Bon retour à Smalltalk Robert!!!!

On 2026-02-28 11:06, Robert Chifflet via Cuis-dev wrote:
> 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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