Last night I co-ran (with Tim Mackinnon and Steve Freeman) an "Introduction to Smalltalk" workshop for some fellow ThoughtWorks colleagues.
It reminded me (as a now sadly ex-Smalltalker) that Smalltalk is Truth and Beauty in a programming language.
There's very little in the language but what there is is great. It's really powerful, productive, terse and readable. Smalltalk is a big improvement over it's successors, such as Ruby and Python. Not only that, but rather than predict the future, Alan Kay invented it (along with the rest of the Smalltalk team at Xerox Parc in the 70's). Windows, networked workstations etc. that are now ubiquitous.
I've been trying out a few implementations: VisualWorks (commercial, multiplatform and very full featured environment and libraries) Dolphin (commercial, windows only and very easy to get on with) and Squeak (free open source, multiplatform and a vibrant community - Alan Kay is the lead of the Squeak team).
Posted by ivan at April 7, 2004 12:42 PMWhich is your favourite implementation so far? Can we expect a comparison in a future blog entry?
Philosophically Squeak; practically VisualWorks. I'm unlikely to write a comparison article myself, but if I see an existing one I like, I'll add a link.
Posted by: ivan at April 23, 2004 8:34 AM