How much do you know Smalltalk?

Question

Now when the Gartner analyst said Smalltalk is cool again and it is used more and more for the web applications with frameworks like in Seaside and Aida/Web, me as a Smalltalker I'm wondering how much my language is known among broader programmer community.

Answer 1

I don't think you can get any reasonable statistics out of stackoverflow. As usual, the Smalltalkers will all respond, and those who don't care won't, which could easily produce the impression that the majority of SO users knows Smalltalk. FWIW, I do.

Answer 2

I have worked with it in the past, principally on old Digitalk versions. Periodically I fiddle with VisualWorks but I've not done anything serious in it. Currently I have a back-burner project to experiment with DOME, which is a toolkit for building domain-specific CASE tools.

There are a few other Smalltalkers about on Stackoverflow. If you want to get a reasonable view on usage, the main driver seems to be Seaside. Perhaps the nice people who maintain that have some idea of actual usage in the large.

Answer 3

This is my first question on stackoverflow and as a newbie I need to start somewhere :) I hope my next question will be more exact and closer to the stackoverflow community

Answer 4

"Me too"

I've dabbled in it enough to appreciate its power and for it to influence the way I develop in other languages. Mostly object-art's Dolphin Smalltalk (which seems to be re-emerging after a period of dormancy: see http://www.object-arts.com/content/news/excitingNews.html)

Good programmers should know something about a range of languages, and I think Smallltalk should be in that list

Answer 5

I love smalltalk, but these days I tend to steer people to Ruby. Here's how I describe Squeak smalltalk:

Smalltalk is one of the world's most beautiful languages. It is designed around taking one idea---objects with inheritance---and pushing it as far as it will go. There are no if statements or while loops; that's done with objects. There is lambda, but it's a kind of object. Even classes are objects!

But that's not the whole story. The people who built Smalltalk built an entire programming environment around it. GUI, browsers, the works. Unfortunately, that environment didn't win. So programming in Smalltalk is a little but like moving to a really nice house... on Mars. Everything you know is wrong (don't open the window!), and it's hard to talk to your neighbors (the operating system) because they're really far away.

Ruby, on the other hand, has taken a lot of the best of Smalltalk and intergrated it very nicely with the operating system. Granted, if you move in, you will find a some Perl cruft in the odd corner, but generally you can write nice Smalltalk code in Ruby. And if you want to talk to your old programs or to the operating system, they're right next door!

Answer 6

Smalltalk and its features are (sadly) unknown to most programmers. You can tell that from the reactions of Non-Smalltalkers, whenever another language or framework version introduces a new cool programming concept, where everyone freaks out. Only the Smalltalkers stay cool and say: "Reminds me of Smalltalk feature XYZ from 15 years ago." ;)

For me one of the most interesting concepts of Smalltalk is still the "everything is at your hands". You don't like how your editor behaves? Just change it! You don't like what happens when this or that class is loaded? Just change it! That's awesome...