Porting Squeak

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Jan 19 03:10:26 UTC 2002



> > > The "odd syntax" and lack of really good tutorials geared to take existing
> > > C(++)/Pascal/Java programmers (or any programmer for that matter) from
> > > newbie to mastery is one of the most significant failings.
> >
> > What do you base these claims on?  In my experience, neither is a
> > problem, except for first impressions.
> 
> Come on, Lex!  This is a common observation.  All new languages look odd.  Smalltalk in 
> particular looks very odd to someone coming from a procedural language background ( or
>  languages such as C++ or Java that use language elements of a procedural language ).  
> I don't think this is a particularly startling revelation.
> 
> I spent years getting used to Smalltalk- didn't have computers in the early 1980's that mere
> mortals like me could use to run it on, so all I had to go on was in the August 1981 issue of
> Byte.  It didn't start to make sense until products like Digitalk's Smalltalk/V DOS came out,
> and I could go through the tutorials on the PC's in my college's computer lab.  Even then,
> it wasn't until I had a particular problem that I wanted to solve  where I got to soak in it
> that I really began to feel comfortable with it, and that was about 8 years after I had bought
> the magazine!


Hold on, I agree that the syntax looks odd to curly-brace people.  I
just don't think it matters, much less that it's "one of the most
significant things" that slows people down.  It's taken me years to
learn Smalltalk, too, but it was just a few days before I could write
the same programs I had been writing in C or Pascal.


The hard parts of Smalltalk are things like OO design, the code browser,
the way collections and streams work, and so on -- not the syntax.



-Lex



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