Kofno

No, there’s not a mouse in my computer. I’ve just been playing with Squeak for a few days.

I was tired of snooty Smalltalkers smirking knowingly down their mustachioed noses at me[1], so I decided to try a Smalltalk dialect myself.

I haven’t gotten far yet. Just emptied the box out on the table and trying to find the edge pieces. But I thought I’d comment on some interesting things:

Image persistance. That’s the most interesting thing so far.

Building an application in an environment where everything is runtime and programmable is amazing. The garbage collection, parts of the VM, the UI, your code, network code, everything. I kind of knew about this. What didn’t really occur to me (until I read the comments in this blog entry) was one side effect of this: No Source files. Wow! No source files. And since everything is runtime all the time, refactoring in Squeak must be great. And debugging, don’t forget about debugging…

As you can see, I’m pretty excited. I can’t wait to get past the tutorials and try a real project.

Some other observations, concerns, whatnot:

Eclipse Java Browsing perspective appears to be inspired by the Smalltalk System browser. I wonder if there’s some history behind this or just the usual vulturing of ideas?

System browser code organization is really interesting. It seems unintutive to me, coming from the world of source files, but that might actually be a mutation. When I think about it, the Squeak/Smalltalk way actually encourages modular code and makes it easy to find methods and objects. Maybe it is a better model.

Using images with teams. Source code management. Revision management. How well do these work with Squeak?

Done writing for tonight. More ideas as events warrant.

1. Things mustachioed types are snooty about: MVC, DSL’s, blocks, etc.