Which Flavor of Smalltalk Is Right For Me?

Learning two languages at once can be hazardous to your mental health.

Now that I know I can deploy Seaside on my Slicehost server, I can move on to the next step, which is deciding which version of Smalltalk I should learn.

The languages I’m familiar with come in only one flavor: vanilla. With C++, PHP , Ruby, and Python there’s no choice at all: you take what they give you. But there are many varieties of Smalltalk to choose from; they all do great stuff, they all have the great features, and  they’re all just different enough that it’s in your best interest to choose one and stick with it. Some are free and som you have to pay for. Which one do you choose?

I’ll cut the suspense and say that my first choice for learning Smalltalk is Squeak. But my choice was entirely accidental. I didn’t choose Squeak on its merits, and it has many. I simply stumbled upon it.

I was taking a math course and wanted to graph some of the equations we were discussing in the class. I considered using PHP but working with PHP’s low-level GD library had already killed off too many of my brain cells. Then by accident, I happened across a book named Squeak: Learning Programming With Robots. I could see at a glance that I could make this Squeak robot do my bidding. Here’s my first Smalltalk program: drawing a square. In fact, drawing 100 squares.

Here’s a small screencast of how Squeak looks in the hands of a rank amateur.

Tagged as: Smalltalk, Squeak