Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: sehyo@netcom.com (Sehyo Chang)
Subject: Re: opinions wanted: VisualAge, VisualWorks, Digitalk
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Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 20:10:29 GMT
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Patrick Logan (pdlogan@ornews.intel.com) wrote:
: Stephen Travis Pope (stp@CNMAT.Berkeley.edu) wrote:

: : I consider it the only serious, stable, high-performance, portable alternative.

: Do you consider Digitalk's serious? high-performance? portable? But not
: some combination?

: I think it is everything but portable (to Unix and Mac).

: : Digitalk's stuff is nice enough, but their class libraries are written in a 
: : rather low-level and un-reusable style.

: Can you give an example as compared to VW?

: The main thing I can think of is the really nice HotDraw-like dispplay
: hierarchy in VW. As a Digitalk user I am envious.

: Otherwise I am not familiar with VW.

: : They also only support DOS and the 
: : Mac, and their versions aren't even portable among each other.

: Well, they fixed that with 3.0 by making OS/2 and Win32 identical.
: (And by *dropping* the Mac!)

I think Digitalk's Smalltalk come long away since their *text* only 
Smalltalk version.  I consider it to be viable platform.

However, in defense of VW, it preserves classic Smalltalk development feel.
I like it's change list, method category, simpler browser navigation,
and of course it's portablity(which can be disadvantage depends on 
your point of view).

I think choice comes down to whether you are planning Window only
development or cross platform(Unix,Mac,etc). VW run best in Unix
workstation although properly configured Pentium is not too bad.

-- sehyo chang

