In reply to: On Learning Smalltalk
I feel like it took me a bit longer to fully understand how to work in Smalltalk than it did most languages. The IDE is different than anything I’ve used before, and probably anything you’ve seen as well. You’re not going to be opening myscript.st in your favorite text editor, and then run it from the command line as you would a Python program. It takes a little mental adjustment to start with.
That’s not the warning, however.
The warning is that once you delve into Smalltalk, you might not want to program in anything else ever again. It’s really that good.
I think this is my curse. I touched Smalltalk at a young age, and, ever since, nothing has felt “right,” or “complete,” in the same way.
Forth is getting close, though, and a lisp or scheme with a tight repl is also pretty wonderful…but Smalltalk defo does you dirty by being so phenomenal. Xcode is a flaming, festering pile of total and complete garbage by comparison. My wish whenever I touch Xcode or Android Studio (which I do daily for work), is that the folks behind such tooling spend just 1 week using a Smalltalk system like Squeak or Pharo to see how much better it could be.