Learning Squeak

Noel J. Bergman noel at devtech.com
Sat Jan 19 06:01:40 UTC 2002


Les,

> A better question is [through] what means did he find
> out about Smalltalk or Squeak.

I found Squeak when looking for technologies to program my iPAQ ON my iPAQ.
Since I had played with Smalltalk a long time ago, it looked like a nice
excuse to get back to it.

As for Smalltalk, the background is boring, but since you asked ... I
started in the same way as you: the August 1981 issue of Byte.  And, like
you, I didn't have anything else like it to work with (as opposed to read)
for years (unless you count Neon, Actor, and Tim Budd's Smalltalk).  I did
have the chance to work with Smalltalk/V in the latter '80s, then in April
of 1990, I wrote "Three Faces of Smalltalk" for Computer Language Magazine,
a review of three Smalltalk implementations.  After that, though, I then
worked on the OMG CORBA task force, and spent most the time since then with
distributed objects using things like C++ and Java.  So I hadn't had a
chance to work again with Smalltalk until I started playing around with the
iPAQ.

(On the other hand, a friend of mine was one of the original "crash test
dummies" for Smalltalk.  She doesn't get a chance to do much with it these
days, but she remembers her experiences with great fondness.  [Alan Kay, if
you are reading, Daniel's daughter Kimberly says "Hi."])

> A few questions would reveal where these other things are.

Actually, I have about 60 links to various pieces of Squeak and Smalltalk
documentation all over the web, plus lots of examples, and the home number
for a *very kind* Squeaker whose generosity I try not to (ab)use.

But that's not really the point, because I wasn't really speaking entirely
about myself.  I am trying to portray the issues for the majority of
programmers coming from C++ and Java.

Personally, I really couldn't care less about the "odd syntax" (Odd? I used
to be an APL programmer), but to the majority of programmers coming from
C/C++/Java/Pascal, with or without an IDE, Smalltalk is alien.  The syntax
isn't bad, just different.  The mechanics of working the three button mouse
assumptions are fine.  But the idioms of working with the environment take
more time.  And Squeak has its own oddities.  For example, I wanted to know
how the whileTrue: message worked, so I looked in the source ... I found
that although the classic implementation exposes recursion, Squeak hides the
(optimized) implementation.

In any event, I'd like to, and intend to, do more with Squeak.  But more
importantly, I'd like to see a lot of other programmers be able to
comfortably adopt Squeak. (I'd also love to see it commonly on PDAs as they
grow up, but that's a pipe dream).  But most programmers aren't going to
spend as much time as I have scouring the web looking for basic information.
And had I seen Mark's book on the shelf, I probably would not have paid much
attention, since the title implied that it was about Multimedia
Applications, rather than about the language.

I'm kind of curious to know how Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and the rest of the
core folks believe that Smalltalk should be learned.  Because from what I
have read, I kind of get the sense that their approach to teaching Smalltalk
is rather different from how I would expect to go about learning a new
programming environment.

	--- Noel




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