[Newbies] Stephane Ducasse's 'Learning to Programing with Robots'

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Thursday 23 Jul 2009 7:24:25 pm Max Norman wrote:
> I'm a novice programmer, who, at the suggestion of several more
> experienced developers, is attempting to get familiar with Smalltalk
> before moving on to Ruby, to more thoroughly learn and understand the
> concepts of object-oriented programming. First off, is this worth doing?
Yes. The hardest part is grasping the concept behind object and messages. 
Smalltalk's inspiration is organisms not numerical integrators for guided 
missiles :-).  See an earlier thread
 http://www.nabble.com/Smalltalk-Data-Structures-and-Algorithms-
td24211375.html
particularly the quote "each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire 
possibilities of a computer".

> 'Squeak by Example' appears to be for more experienced programmers, who
> are approaching Squeak/Smalltalk from a linguistic perspective.
I presume you wish to practice programming for the long term. Why not start 
working in Squeak right away? Smalltalk is a "small" language (only four 
reserved words!). v3.8 image has a good intro-level slides on Smalltalk. Etoys 
4 has such a low barrier that even middle school students start programming in 
a couple of days time.

Subbu