[squeak-dev] Using Squeak to learn about high-level programming environments?

Derek Peschel dpeschel at sdf.lonestar.org
Wed Aug 5 18:59:25 UTC 2009


Back in April (!) I subscribd to squeak-dev and squeak-nos to ask this
one question.  Lurking has taught me a lot, but the threads about the
future of Squeak overwhelmed my brain and I plan to unsubscribe after I
get some sort of answer.

I'm interested in debugging, reflection, and virtualization.  Fixing errors
can be fun, and making changes at runtime is an addicting power.  Mostly I've
been studying implementations and learning concepts rather than doing any
coding.  Machine-language debuggers can be powerful (I've studied several)
but they aren't abstract at all, so they are hard to understand and maintain.
I'm looking for a system that is easy to understand and easy to make small
incremental changes to.

Smalltalk has always looked promising, since it's a high-level langauge that
can describe most of its own runtime which includes programming tools.
I still don't know which version is best for my purposes.

Going from the beige Smalltalk-80 books and Inside Smalltalk, I've always
assumed the original Smalltalk-80 code worked correctly, had decent high-
level comments, and matched the comments.  Is that really true?  Anyway,
it doesn't run on modern hardware afAIK and the limitations of the MVC-
architecture window system quickly become apparent.

An old version of Squeak might be Smalltalk-80 on modern hardware but it
suffers from the same window-ssytem limitations.

New versions of Squeak try to fix the window system but have made so many
other changes.  I find myself dealing with small "why isn't this working?"
bugs I don't want to investigate, or the concepts are much harder to see.
Also the classic programming tools like the system tracer and image shrinking
have been neglected for a long time.

Pharo and Cuis sound potentially useful.  I still need to try them.

What about one of the commercial Smalltalks?  Or a different langauge?
Except the language should have an environment ready to go, and there are
a lot fewer of those.

Thanks,

-- Derek



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