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Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days) In my experience coming to Pharo Smalltalk after a 15 year journey through C, C++, VB, PHP, ObjC, a

Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days) In my experience coming to Pharo Smalltalk after a 15 year journey through C, C++, VB, PHP, ObjC, and Ruby (my second favorite lang), I can say that none of the reasons I find Smalltalk awesome are historical. This idea that one should "learn Smalltalk to bring those lessons with you to the language you 'really' plan on using" is a silly idea, often repeated. Most importantly, Smalltalk is an environment, not a language... The Smalltalk community is full of talented developers doing cutting edge research and serious commercial applications. We use Smalltalk, for example, because its live, open, dynamic environment makes it a joy to use and blows productivity through the roof. Having complete control over the IDE is a dream - as a small example, when I got tired of constantly navigating to my default code directory, I added a default setting to Pharo Smalltalk, in about 5 minutes, so I and every other user could benefit. This kind of enhancement is routine because it's so damn easy! Even in Ruby, it's a hassle to dig through a lib's source files and find the code to edit. In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?!

vidarh 14y ago
Ruby is a language, not an environment. So why are you comparing Smalltalk environment to a language? (this applies largely to the original article as well - if you want to compare languages, compare languages; if you want to compare environments, compare environments). There are Ruby environments that provide fairly deep introspection and live changes to a system, like Pry. It's just not the main way of doing things. For a reason: It's not the way most developers are used to working.
- seandenigris 14y ago
  You are asking to force the question into an artificially created box that doesn't help us get to the truth. The Smalltalk experience is naturally - and more fairly - compared to Ruby as an experience. They are both tools, and thus we're primarily concerned with their utility, not inherent value. One wants to know: how will these tools help me to achieve my goals. The answer is that the turtles-all-the-way-down experience of Smalltalk helps devs achieve those goals more quickly, easily, and joyfully. p.s. Thanks for pointing out Pry! I didn't know about it and it looks really cool :) As it relates to this conversation though, a more-advanced repl is stone-age technology.
mattbriggs 14y ago
>> In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?! VB6?

vidarh 14y ago

Ruby is a language, not an environment. So why are you comparing Smalltalk environment to a language? (this applies largely to the original article as well - if you want to compare languages, compare languages; if you want to compare environments, compare environments). There are Ruby environments that provide fairly deep introspection and live changes to a system, like Pry. It's just not the main way of doing things. For a reason: It's not the way most developers are used to working.

seandenigris 14y ago
You are asking to force the question into an artificially created box that doesn't help us get to the truth. The Smalltalk experience is naturally - and more fairly - compared to Ruby as an experience. They are both tools, and thus we're primarily concerned with their utility, not inherent value. One wants to know: how will these tools help me to achieve my goals. The answer is that the turtles-all-the-way-down experience of Smalltalk helps devs achieve those goals more quickly, easily, and joyfully. p.s. Thanks for pointing out Pry! I didn't know about it and it looks really cool :) As it relates to this conversation though, a more-advanced repl is stone-age technology.

mattbriggs 14y ago

>> In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?! VB6?