rexmere.com

Periodically throughout my career, I’ve resolved to learn Smalltalk. I first encountered the Blue Book in the technical library during a co-op at IBM in Rochester MN. My first encounter with a Smalltalk environment was on a DEC MicroVax in the mid-80’s when I worked there.More recently I’ve looked at Squeak. Squeak’s interesting in that it’s a fairly direct descendent of the original Smalltalk. In fact a recent discussion on the mailing list suggested that some of the object instances in the current image were probably first “new’d” back in the 80s. Squeak has a rather complicated history and both suffers and benefits from the rather different uses to which it is put.The trouble with Squeak, for me anyway, is that since it’s so many different things to so many different people it can be a little distracting when you’re just trying to find an entrance. I’ve a feeling that it’ll be a little easier to get “into” Squeak once I can bring a more complete understanding of a more traditional Smalltalk—with that I think the experimental and exploratory aspects of Squeak will be much more approachable.So lately I’ve been playing with Cincom’s Smalltalk. Their non-commercial release is free (as in beer), unlimited, and uncrippled and serves as a somewhat more straightforward environment to work with, at least for me. In any event they’ve got a rich set of documentation that’s focused on building the kind of apps I’m used to.While I’m on the subject of learning Smalltalk, it’s worth pointing out Stephane Ducasse’s Free Smalltalk Books. Professor Ducasse has done the extraordinary work of tracking down the rights holders to a fairly complete library of Smalltalk books and gotten permission to make PDFs of those books freely available on the Internet. With those and the Cincom Visual Works product, the budding Smalltalk student is well supplied with the need to invest only time.