squeak: new language that looks like an open-source flash?

[urlwolf]

http://www.squeak.org/

Seems to have some advantages such as
# Strongly Typed
# Garbage Collected
# Interpreted

I always hated how difficult it is to debug actionScript, even with third-party libraries and tools. The entire paradigm kind of forces you to have variables with a wide scope (practically 'globals') and that is just a way to let you shoot you in the foot.

Have you heard of this squeak before? The mailing list seems very active:
http://news.gmane.or...ltalk.squeak.general

They have a very large wiki (6000 pages):
http://wiki.squeak.org/Squeak

It also seems to be very fast, at least compared to actionScript:
http://www.visoracle...akfaq/benchmark.html
(unfortunately, that benchmark might be pretty old; no date to be found).

Since it has inherited properties from smalltalk, and the language itself may look a bit like ruby, whereas actionScript looks more like javascript/PHP.

What are your thoughts on this?

[mouser]

Squeak is not "based on" smalltalk.. it *is* smalltalk.

As such it's going to be a very pure nice object-oriented language, great for understanding programming languages and concepts.

But I don't see how it is useful as a flash alternative..

[Gothi[c]]

The croquet project is also based on the squeak language.
(see https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3329.0 )

[lanux128]

there is also OpenLaszlo which aims to transcend the various formats of the web, plenty of demos here..

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.