Lots of people have heard of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace and Proust’s À la
Recherche du Temps Perdu . But not so many people
have actually read them…
Smalltalk is the programming equivalent
of those books. An important and influential language,
the great granddaddy of object orientation and graphical
user interfaces, Smalltalk’s name will be familiar
to many programmers who have never actually used the
language. Which, frankly, is a shame.
I suspect that when we hear that something is ‘important’ and ‘influential’ many
of us immediately jump to the conclusion that it must
also be boring. This may explain why more of us are likely
to be familiar with the works of J K Rowling than of
Tolstoy and Proust. The mighty reputation of those great
writers is positively intimidating.
Where Smalltalk is concerned, any fears of dullness
are unfounded. This is about as much fun as programming
gets. The language itself is neat and elegant - with
a terse, expressive syntax and a large and powerful class
library; its version of object orientation is, as you
might expect, neat and rigorous - no sign here of objects
being ‘bolted on’ to a standard procedural
language. And its integrated development environment
is a joy to work with.
Of course, there are important differences between
various implementations of Smalltalk. Over the past couple
of months we’ve provided tutorials for the free
Squeak Smalltalk. Now, while there are many things I
love about Squeak, I do find its user interface a little
challenging. Personally, I’ve always liked the
commercial system, Dolphin Smalltalk. So I am delighted
this month to be able to offer Bitwise readers an exclusive
free copy of Dolphin Smalltalk. Download it HERE and
read our introductory tutorial HERE.
Just in case you had any lingering doubts, I hope that
this will persuade you that the one thing you can’t
say about Smalltalk is that it’s boring!
Huw Collingbourne
(Editor)
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