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The article itself might be a fluff piece, but Smalltalk is a worthwhile investment of time anyway. I believe I grasped the more interesting ideas in Smalltalk
by shalabhc 9y ago
The article itself might be a fluff piece, but Smalltalk is a worthwhile investment of time anyway.
I believe I grasped the more interesting ideas in Smalltalk when I approached it not as just another programming 'language', but rather as a complete programming 'system' in itself - a virtual computer, if you will. Instead of files, this system contains 'objects', which communicate with other objects via messaging. The entire network of objects is transparently persisted and implementation details are themselves represented as objects-with-messaging (i.e. self hosting). The UI is just another mechanism to send messages (clicks, keypresses) to some objects, etc.
It's unfortunate that something like Unix with it's primitive notion of files, processes and 'stream of bytes' thinking has become the dominant environment, rather than something like Smalltalk - where the objects are reflective and communicate with semantically richer messages.
- lukego 9y agoI am writing Smalltalk code lately. I find it useful to think of Smalltalk as an operating system, like Linux or Windows or Emacs. It has a different way of doing things, and learning this is both frustrating and rewarding. It brings back vague memories of learning Linux for me. It feels like a nice way to break out of the bubble of that Rob Pike famously lamented in http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf.
- shalabhc 9y agoYes the analogy to an OS is good. Many language comparisons sadly miss this because they just look at Smalltalk through a 'programming language' lens and only see at a slice of the Smalltalk system. Interestingly there is an Pharonos project (maybe defunct now?) http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos