I found Dynamic Web Development with Seaside and made a small breakthrough. I’m finding that learning Smalltalk is harder than I had anticipated. I’m accustomed to learning languages quickly. But most of the languages I’ve learned are C-based: C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. Even Ruby is in that club.
But Smalltalk is weird and foreign to my C-biased eyes. In the beginning I was like one of those poor guys who’s lost a limb and experiences phantom sensations where his arms and legs used to be. They parts are gone, but the brain still thinks they’re out there. In my case, I’d lost my editor (vi) and the crowd of templates, source code and HTML files I’m comfortable with. I’d also lost my command line debugging tools and grep, not to mention that cozy Rails directory structure I’ve been using for the last 4 years. I felt that suddenly I was working in the dark, without eyes, without hands.
Part of the problem is that I am impatient. I want to see some quick results, as I did when I learned Ruby. I want to get my test site (the e-card site I always build with a new language) up and running yesterday. But I there I was flailing and failing at the thought of opening a directory and reading a list of files.
Fortunately I don’t give up if there’s the faintest glimmer of hope. In my case, that glimmer came when I was reading through Mark Guzdial’s Squeak: Object-oriented design with multimedia applications and found that I could get a directory handle very simply with this line:
directory = FileDirectory on: pathToImages
and an array of file names with these lines:
imageNames := OrderedCollection new.
directory fileNames
do: [ :p | imageNames add: p ]
What relief I felt when I wrote that code and it worked. I was back on familiar turf, with a solid array of file names to work with.
To paraphrase Archimedes, If you give me a array and a place to stand, I can move the world. My world, at least.
