Göran Hultgren <goran.hultgren at bluefish.se> writes:


> I admit that I haven\'t seen how Squeak works without guidance, though I have my
> suspicions. If you have guidance at hand then it\'s another story. Like the eToy
> sessions with kids - the kids have guidance and it seems to work very well then.

After a couple of weeks of playing with squeak I began to wonder if it
is really all worth while, since I hadn't accomplished much. But I
made two interesting obeservations:

(1) After about a month or so my inner monologue started to come up
    with smalltalkish solutions for all sorts of programming
    problems. I believe this will continue. It is the beginning of
    starting to think in smalltalk.

(2) I realized that the things I am playing with at the moment could
    be called "widged programming". This is something I never dreamed
    of doing in neither C nor perl.

Yes you cannot use squeak without guidance and obviously it takes more
than a month (at least for me). It took longer than that to master the
unix shell. No reason to worry so far. Having Yoda sitting nearby
would of course be a big boost, but people on the list are very
helpful.

BTW: I bought Kent Beck's pattern book in German. The transation is
very bad. It is a pleasure to read the Smalltalk code compared to the
German text :-).