Welcome to Squeak

Welcome to Squeak

I've been looking at and installing Gnu Smalltalk at home over the weekend - Squeak seems to be going from strength to strength but it's a bit of a rich diet for someone used to Java, C, Perl and shell scripting. I need an intermediate stepping stone, and hopefully gst is it.

I learnt Smalltalk on an Open University course on OO design and programming several years ago, but found it very weird after C and mostly had as little to do with it as possible once the coursework had been done.

Then I adapted to Java and now I'm really interested in Smalltalk - all of the good ideas of Xerox Parc and Alan Kay/Dan Ingalls on language design were nicked by James Gosling for Java (along with much of Perl's), but Java is way overcomplicated - Smalltalk can still be explained in two pages. Dan Ingalls, who wrote the original Smalltalk for Parc, wrote a couple of good papers on his ideas which are here (if you ever feel the need to program in it). Dunno if you've come across it, but Squeak (www.squeak.org) is what Ingalls and Kay are working on now, and it is ... remarkable!