Help - The Squeak Environment - 6. Why is the Squeak environment so different?
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Squeak is different, and it will take some getting used to, and it's
unlike anything
you've seen before (unless you know
Smalltalk or
Self) while it is also superficially much like what you know in
many of its more directly visible presentations - for it does have windows, and
buttons, and responds to mouse-clicks etc.
The reason the Squeak environment
is different from any other environment is
it's very great versatility and power, commented on above: Very much and very
many different things are possible in it and combinable in Squeak, and very many
things may be happening in it, and all of this makes Squeak quite different from
other progranms. (Indeed, your clicking on many of the many options in the many
pop-up menus in the project window or other windows may cause unexpected
responses: see Walkback for what may happen and how to react to it.)
It looks different in part because of what it is - an interpreted programming
environment of great versatility and power - and in part because of how it came
to be. For Squeak is in fact the result of a continuous development of the
Smalltalk language and environment, that date back 25 years, and in which were
the first to do windowing and mousing. The interface Squeak offers is inherited
from this Smalltalk.
That Squeak is interpreted is another feature that makes it different from most
other programming environments, that usually are compiled. In simple terms,
compiled means faster but far less versatile and easy to use and change.
A concluding important reason why Squeak is different is that it involves a
loaded image.The word "image" has a special meaning in this context: The
image is a large precompiled set of programming code, ready to run, and designed for
very many different ends, some few of which are showing you the screen you see.
An image is loaded whenever you run the Squeak.exe, and it is the image that
contains the source for what the Squeak environment shows to you. All of this
code is ready to run Squeak Language program code and can be seen and edited in
the Squeak environment, namely in the
System Browser and other
Browsers and
Coding Tools, but these we will turn in later sections.
First, we return again to working with and in the environment.