[squeak-dev] Emacs as a conceptual entry point to Smalltalk

Ronald Spengler ron.spengler at gmail.com
Sat Aug 15 21:03:39 UTC 2009


In trying to explain my hobby-horse to friends and coworkers, I often find
that there is a strong conceptual barrier to understanding Smalltalk. It's
just too radical a departure in too many ways to construct a good elevator
pitch for.
Example:

"Well, we don't really have a lot of files except when we really need them.
We just do everything in memory most of the time."

One thing that's helped me explain it to the people I work with is: Squeak
is a lot like Emacs. Emacs is a text editor / IDE written mostly in a
dialect of Lisp. Smalltalk can be described as (with the exception of the
GNU thing) an IDE implemented in a dialect of Smalltalk.

I would guess that roughly 80% of my coworkers who are engineers grok Emacs,
and roughly 50% use it. I consider myself lucky:)

I have a question for the more experienced folks on the list: Is Smalltalk
as well suited to the task of editing/refactoring/beautifying code in
arbitrary languages as Lisp? I thought there was an IDE like that written in
Smalltalk once, I could've sworn I'd read about something like that well
before I knew what Smalltalk was. Might I implement the next fantastic
general purpose IDE in Squeak with the same ease?

Also: What analogies have helped you explain Smalltalk to people who've not
used it before?


Thanks in advance for your replies,

Ron
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