4 ms·

Had you programmed at all prior to college? I took my first college-level programming class a year earlier than you, using Smalltalk, and I hated the language.

by rauhl 6y ago

Had you programmed at all prior to college? I took my first college-level programming class a year earlier than you, using Smalltalk, and I hated the language. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But in high school I had programmed in C, and earlier than that in HyperTalk and earlier still in Basic. I was too immature at the time to see the similarities between HyperTalk and Smalltalk, and too hung up on what I thought of as C’s close-to-the-machine nature to appreciate Smalltalk’s high-level power. I think that my previous programming experience — which really wasn’t very extensive! — made it more difficult for me to understand what was good and desirable about Smalltalk. It really was Blub for me. But I don’t blame Smalltalk for that; I blame me. I was 18, immature, unable to imagine a world outside my head, and with strikingly little actual experience. I’d like to blame all that on my age, but of course there are folks who were better on these metrics at the same age. (I stuck with my major, though in large part because later classes were all in C, and maybe one was in Lisp and another in Java — it has been so long now that I cannot remember. Glad I did!)

codr7 6y ago
I get the feeling it has a lot to do with how much your teacher loves the language. I was introduced to Common Lisp at university, didn't get it at all. At least Prolog could do cool tricks. Took me several years of Graham yabbering about it to make the effort, and to my surprise it was all that and more. I realize now that my teacher didn't have enough experience to really understand what was great about Lisp. I have since learned Smalltalk as well, and admire many aspects of it; but with the wrong teacher it would have failed just as epically.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  This is how learning OCaml and having access to Native Oberon and Smalltalk/V did to me. It opened my mind to an alternative universe of safe systems programing and computing models. This kind of stuff is a bit like explaining monads I guess, it only groks if one goes through the experience themselves and it always hard to convince others just with words.
alrs 6y ago
I had. I wrote some Applesoft BASIC as a kid, and was handy enough with LOGO that they brought in teachers from around the city to have me teach them at age 12. My first and only lisp. The other side of this story is that I always encourage people to keep their modern-day children away from BASIC, at it only makes learning any other language harder. My bad Smalltalk experience is hard to imagine today: Hey kid, here's a language that can only be written in one IDE on one operating system. Don't worry that the IDE doesn't run on your Linux computer, because the programs that you write won't run on your computer, either. The artifacts you generate won't be files, they'll be images. We're not going to actually cover that part, so when you're ready to turn this in you'll need to copy-and-paste the working code into your email client. You'll know it's ready when you press "F5" and nothing bad happens.

by rauhl 6y ago

codr7 6y ago

I get the feeling it has a lot to do with how much your teacher loves the language. I was introduced to Common Lisp at university, didn't get it at all. At least Prolog could do cool tricks. Took me several years of Graham yabbering about it to make the effort, and to my surprise it was all that and more. I realize now that my teacher didn't have enough experience to really understand what was great about Lisp. I have since learned Smalltalk as well, and admire many aspects of it; but with the wrong teacher it would have failed just as epically.

pjmlp 6y ago
This is how learning OCaml and having access to Native Oberon and Smalltalk/V did to me. It opened my mind to an alternative universe of safe systems programing and computing models. This kind of stuff is a bit like explaining monads I guess, it only groks if one goes through the experience themselves and it always hard to convince others just with words.

alrs 6y ago

I had. I wrote some Applesoft BASIC as a kid, and was handy enough with LOGO that they brought in teachers from around the city to have me teach them at age 12. My first and only lisp. The other side of this story is that I always encourage people to keep their modern-day children away from BASIC, at it only makes learning any other language harder. My bad Smalltalk experience is hard to imagine today: Hey kid, here's a language that can only be written in one IDE on one operating system. Don't worry that the IDE doesn't run on your Linux computer, because the programs that you write won't run on your computer, either. The artifacts you generate won't be files, they'll be images. We're not going to actually cover that part, so when you're ready to turn this in you'll need to copy-and-paste the working code into your email client. You'll know it's ready when you press "F5" and nothing bad happens.