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I installed Pharo 1.4 and tried to read "Pharo by example".
Unfortunately, the book and the Pharo image were totally out of synch with each other: menus were different; classes used as examples were not there e.g; BouncingAtomsMorph class.
It is a pity. Maybe one should use a specific Pharo version to learn and another to get up to date...can anyone help?
First of all be sure to complete Prof Stef's tutorial, it gives basic knowledge. You can start the tutorial by executing
ProfStef go.
in a workspace. Just type it in the workspace, select it, right-click, Do it
There is also a Pharo collaborative book that has interesting things. And there are Pharocasts that can help you to learn something interesting.
Also you can ask questions here on Stack Overflow an tag them with pharo or smalltalk if it's more general and people will help you out.
As said by #Sharphawk, there is an image to be used with the book, available from the homepage. It's a bit old by now, but it should be in sync with the book.
Pharo simply evolves too fast for us to keep up with the book (there are still many chapters under progress), so with recent images you'll have to adapt and discover a bit by yourself. Fortunately there are a lot of other ressources where you can get help: here of course, mailing lists for the book and for Pharo itself, the #pharo-project IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, the books & screencasts pointed to by #uko, etc.
From experience, Smalltalk is much easier to learn with some exploration and mentoring
For absolute beginners, the following is a very recent practical and hands-on tutorial, covering just the basics to get you going:
http://ceronio.net/2017/07/first-steps-with-pharo-smalltalk/
As your question is a bit vague (understandably), and I do not know your background or your needs, I'll try to give a short overview over Pharo, so that you know where to look for, as you gain more experience and your needs evolve.
Language Basics
As Uko has pointed out, if you are new to Smalltalk the best way to get started
is to follow Prof Stef's tutorial. This will get you familiar with the core aspects of the language. For quick reference, you can use the Pharo Cheatsheet.
Basic Tooling
After you have completed the tutorial, you should familiarize yourself with the tools so that you can work effectively in Pharo. Vital tools, as you probably already know, are the Class Browser, the Inspector and the Debugger.
Learning from Code Examples
The Class Browser has a lot of useful features, in particular it allows you to search the system for method and class references, pointing you to concrete code examples. You can right-click on any method and then choose "Senders of..." in the context menu. Similarly, for classes, you can look for references (Analyze -> Class Refs). This will tell you how particular classes and methods are used, and more than often, will get you faster to the information you need.
Another indispensible tool is Spotter (shift-enter), which provides an easy to use interface to browse the system (for classes and examples). But you'd have to use recent Pharo version.
Ecosystem Overview
That being said, the Pharo ecosystem is quite huge and it will take you some time to get the most out of it (I have been working with Pharo for quite some time now, and there are many things I still have to learn).
Depending on your needs, Pharo has a lot to offer:
Roassal (for software & data visualization)
Glamourous Toolkit (GT) (including Spotter, the Debugger, and the Inspector).
GT allows you to customize all of its tools. For instance, you can customize the inspector very easily to have domain-specific views for your objects. Lots of built-in libraries, such as PetitParser, have customized interfaces that allow you to work more effectively with objects.
Morphic for writing GUIs. There is also Spec, a DSL built on top of morphic, which allows you to describe user-interfaces.
Monticello for version control and building packages that can be deployed to other images.
SUnit for writing testcases.
Roassal is very different from Morphic as it is tailored for rendering all sorts graphs in nice layouts (while it is possible to do that in Morphic as well, you'd have to write a lot of code). Also Roassal uses Vector Graphics, Morphic is raster-based.
If you want to write GUIs or a game, I'd stick to morphic. If you have to visualize data, use Roassal.
An excellent introduction into the core concepts of Morphic is given by Maloney (the originator of Morphic). Some class names have changed, but you'll figure it out.
There are also different ways in doing event handling in Morphic. One way is to override methods (like you are used from other object-oriented GUI frameworks), another way is to "route" events to methods. I have used both methods, and I'd pick the first one for simpler applications.
Start with a simple project
My advice would be to start with the very basics, best with a small project, for instance a game like Snake. Add things as you learn and if you are stuck, feel free to ask questions on stackoverflow. Also, there is the Pharo mailing list.
I found that the Pharo / Smalltalk community is very welcoming.
My last advice would be: Keep things simple. It's not always easy to do, but Smalltalk is a great environment to learn this principle. You'd also want to look at Kent Beck's Best Practice Patterns if you are looking for ways how to organize your code.
Have fun!
Edit: Holy thread resurrection! I just realized that the question is over 4 years old. Well, maybe this post if some help to other newcomers.
Seaside just released a release candidate for the upcoming 3.0 version, so it appeared on my radar again. As I'm currently pondering what web framework to use for a future project, I wonder whether it's something to consider. Alas, most of the publicity for Seaside is from '07, which is probably one or two generations for the web. So I'm hoping that the community here can answer some questions
Continuation-based frameworks were pretty great when most of your workflow was mostly in HTML, e.g. form submits. For today's JavaScript-heavy environments, that hardly seems worthwhile anymore.
Is Squeak able to handle a reasonable workload? From other questions here and elsewhere, it seems that for proper scaling another implementation (Gemstone etc.) would probably fare better in the long run, but I don't have a proper idea how far away that is. Sessions seem to be rather expensive.
I know that comparisons are hard, but most of the articles you find on the net set Seaside and Rails side by side. How would combinations like Scala/Lift, Clojure/Compojure or Erlang/Nitrogen do instead?
I have answers to question one and two:
This is true. However since version 2.8 Seaside is not a strictly "continuation-based" framework anymore. Seaside uses continuations in the flow module only. Since Seaside 3.0 the flow module is even optional. Also note that Seaside has strong Javascript support since 2005, this is long before mainstream frameworks started to add Javascript functionality. Today Seaside comes with JQuery and JQueryUI support built-in.
Of course that depends on what you store within your session objects, but typically sessions are small (less than 20 KiB). Use the memory profiler in your application to determine the exact memory consumption.
And there is a new seaside book: http://book.seaside.st/book
I find the productivity of working in a Smalltalk IDE with a good set of abstractions outweights all other issues in engineering dominated projects. It works well as an enterprise system for a small company with about 100 (simultaneous, but not heavy) users on a single server (without going to SSD). Since 2007:
Seaside has shown to be able to make the switch from html workflows to javascript ones;
Seaside has been ported to a lot of different Smalltalks;
Has seen Gemstone release GLASS;
The new 'cog' vm with much improved performance has been released a few weeks ago and shows great promise for improved performance.
In Smalltalk we have now three web frameworks to consider, besides Seaside also
Aida/Web and
Iliad.
Both later effectively solve three-like control flow, but without needing continuations. Both also have a very strong Ajax integration, actually you don't realize anymore that you are working with Ajax.
Both also scale in memory consumption well. 10.000 sessions spend 220MB in Aida/Web, that is about 23KB per session, which can be further optimized down to mere 400B per session. This means, that you can run not only but many websites from the single Smalltalk image. Of course you can always upgrade to load balancing solution, when you really need. Which is from my experience very rarely needed.
Comparing to Ruby on Rails, a friend of mine complained that he needs 50MB of memory initially for every webshop site he is selling. He then turned to the Aida/Web solution where he needs about the same MB for the image, but then just few KB for every additional webshop site.
Avi Bryant, the developer of Seaside, said that AJAX triumphs continuations in almost all situations. Nevertheless, you can build reasonably powerful applications with Seaside and AJAX, too.
The Application part of a Web-App can be done in other frameworks quite well using Ajax.
I think a Seaside integrated Smalltalk-to-Javascript Framework like Cappuccino-for-Clamato is missing, currently. I'd like to be able to build real Javascript-Apps using Smalltalk.
Javascript is awesome but being capable of dealing with complicated workflow in a clean cheap way in the server side (as Seaside allows you to) is preventing it to become obsolete. Economy and utility are things that gives return in the short and long run. But telling this in the abstract has no value at all. You should be talking about a precise application and deciding if seaside is part of your bunch of competitive advantages to form an equation that rocks (and knowing why).
About scaling workload with Seaside, the short answer is that you can scale it like hell yah (for the long answer check my answer here: Does Seaside scale?).
too unanswerable man :) rty a variation of what you're really trying to ask
I think the best thing you can do is a prototype of something in a weekend.
If you can do a prototype in two days and you can capture some attention and you enjoyed the developing experience of doing it with seaside then you'll have the foundation of your next thing.
It costs only your time (you can publish in an amazon server).
BTW, this week I've heard about a startup that made its prototype by hand (was everything static and they processed stuff manually). Pretty amazing and crazy and cheap. When they felt that they had enough traction on the idea (which the had) they implemented the app (with whatever tech, I'm sure is no challenge for a seaside developer)
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I'm responsible of finding a good way to document the software project I'm working on.
What things are important to document? Should documentation of code and design mainly be in the code in the form of comments? Should we put text files or Word documents directly in the source control togetether with code? Should we use a wiki?
Factors to think about include how easy it is for the current team to create the documentation, and how easy it is for other developers to find, correct and extend the documentation later. My experience from many projects is that developers tend to not write documentation because the system for writing it is too complex or developer unfriendly, and that after a few years, new developers can hardly find the little documentation that was written.
I'm interested in what approaches you have used in similar projects. What worked well, what did not work well, and why?
Some key facts about the project:
The platform is C# and .NET.
We use Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server for source control and work item (task) management.
We use Scrum and test-driven development and are inspired by domain-driven design.
The software consists of a collection of web services and two GUI clients.
Other clients are going to integrate with the web services in the future. The integration will be done by other developers on other teams (so the web services form a kind of API).
SharePoint is heavily used throughout the development environment. Most projects have a SharePoint site, including ours.
On our project's SharePoint site we currently have a bunch of MS Office documents on things like requirements, design, presentations for stakeholders etc. Keeping everything up to date is hard.
We also have a SharePoint wiki for the development team only, where we document things in an unstructured manner as we go along. Examples include how our build scripts are organized, our testing policy, coding guidelines.
The software is an in-house application in a fairly big financial institution.
The software is developed by a team of six people over a period of ~1 year.
The developers are consultants hired in for this project only, and will not be available to help in the future (unless the client decides to pay for it).
The client has few guidlines for how this kind of project should be documented.
I think the most important things to document are the decisions. This goes for everything from requirements to architectural choices. What are the requirements of module X? How are these requirements represented in the architecture? Why did you choose architectural pattern A over B? What are the benefits? The same goes for source code: it is common knowledge that commenting the why is way better than the how.
How you document these decisions does not matter that much in my opinion, whether you use a Wiki or a Requirements document made in Word. More important is that these documents are always up-to-date and that it is easy for anyone to access them. This can be achieved by using a wiki, or placing the documents under source control, as you say. If only a few have access to them, they are more likely not to get updated, and not to be read when necessary.
We use a Wiki for our current project and it works very well. It is easy to access for anyone (developers, managers, and customers) and a history can track changes, so you know what has been changed and why. Furthermore, we try to document the code in a meaningful way and document the major design decisions. We try not to document too much, e.g. minor things, as it is always hard to keep those things up-to-date and it is not worth the effort, imho.
Worst for me than lack of documentation is excess of documentation.
Keep in mind that yes: it's really important to document your project, but also that the major part of your documentation is always at risk of never been read at all.
So, I think that a good starting point consist in thinking of your documentation more like something that you may use to introduce new developers to your project than an over detailed description of the inner workings of your software.
G'day,
Definitely use a wiki. I'd recommend TWiki as it's an excellent and extensive implementation of a wiki without being too complicated to install and manage.
Here's a couple of initial thoughts.
Categories:
Start off with an initial ontology of what you want to capture but
allow people to add new categories or sub-categories as required,
allow people to retitle (sub-)categories as required and maybe as agreed for this one so you don't get fragmentation for multiple names for basically the same thing.
let any initial (sub-)categories wither and die if they are left empty. Do this at the end of the project as some areas may only have entries towards the end of a project.
Tagging:
Start using a tag cloud. BTW here's an excellent plug-in available for TWiki to start classifying content early on in the project. Retrofitting tags is almost impossible to do. Starting tagging early also allows people to search for information that may be there already rather than having the same info located in multiple places.
HTH I'll come back and add more points as I think of them.
First and most important, have the comments written in such a way that NDoc can parse them. This is the best way to have the code itself documented, as the developers have to change their development practices very little, and you can generate pages that explain the code without having to look at the code.
Second, getting developers to write documentation is not easy, and getting them to do it might be an exercise in futility. This is where products like Fogbugz come into play. They will help manage the development with tickets, help track check ins, and when your done an iteration, generate release notes.
In conclusion, your best bet is to find the most effective solution that fits in with the devs existing process. If it impacts their development process very little, they will be more likely to adopt the system.
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Is there any website specifically for sharing and accessing actual software development processes implemented in software organizations?
There are lots of resources that give advices and descriptions for implementing these processes. They are very useful. But I think having actual example process definitions would be very useful as well. Specifically, I am now looking for an example process definition in CMMI. I overviewed several books but none of them presents any specific example implementation.
I think the authors are probably concerned that the readers might just copy these process definitions without understanding specific customization decisions in them. They are very rightful in this concern. But anyway, I think this is an important need for general software community. Understanding and interpreting an example document properly should be the responsibility of the reader.
If you don't know any good resource that shares specific implementations of the processes, what do you think about this need? Don't you think that we, software engineers and developers, should share our process definitions as we share our code?
There is a good wikipedia article with a lot of resources. Also searching for "UCM Workflows" on IBM Rational web would lead to good examples, I'd rather not deep link into their page. The question is how far into detail you want to go into the process. Most resources available will only give you a rough overview of basic development processes.
What you mean by examples is probably going into the details of specific implementation of such development process. For larger and established software development companies their development process will most likely not be readily reusable, because it will involve many custom made tools and configurations and the process itself could be in some cases considered proprietary, giving the company a competitive edge over others. Going into details about the process could also pose a security risk, because it would reveal a lot about the company infrastructure. So I don't think you would find much in form of examples from successful software development companies and what you find is either too general or written by theory-crafters.
This is a field of special interest for me for almost a decade now and I only ever found bits and pieces published about specific processes used by major software corporations. I would certainly welcome a forum to share experience with other professionals in this field.
Try looking at EPFC - Eclipse Process Composing Framework, there are some example processes, tools and best practices to develop them.
There are merits in providing some sample templates which would assist someone getting started. The limitation is that it could force the user to adopt the templates without thinking about the application.
Most methodologies adopt a 'guideline' approach with some tailoring. For example, the RUP system, promoted by Rational (now IBM) traditionally suffered from the assumption that it was only applicable to large scale projects. This prompted discussion on how RUP can be applied to a one person project. Of course it takes work and effort and if you are a small project team sometimes tailoring the methodology could overshadow the project; i.e are you trying to build a methodology or a product ?
As for samples some examples are:
Agile Unified Process - gives good examples of both process, artifacts and also commentary on the process and it's application,
Open Unified Process - again samples, artifacts and easily navigated system.
I do not know of such a "process repository". I only see general description like this one.
Note: While the CMMI implementations I have come across are quite tailored for a specific enterprise/environment, I found them truly effective when evaluated/challenged.
In that regard, the study Six Sigma and CMMI interesting, not so much as a practical example of CMM, but rather as a way to put CMM in perspective.
The OPEN Process Framework Repository Organization's web site contains an online repository with over 1,100 method components.
It doesn't contain final methods because, according to method engineering precepts, you must compose your methods from these components depending on your product, project and organisational needs.
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My questions is simple!
Would you start learning Smalltalk if you had the time? Why? Why not?
Do you already know Smalltalk? Why would you recommend Smalltalk? Why not?
Personally I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer and I really like it. However, I'm thinking about Smalltalk because I read various blogs and some people are calling Ruby something like "Smalltalk Light". The second reason why I'm interested in Smalltalk is Seaside.
Maybe someone has made the same transition before?
EDIT: Actually, what got me most excited about Smalltalk/Seaside is the following Episode of WebDevRadio: Episode 52: Randal Schwartz on Seaside (among other things)
If you like Ruby you'll probably like Smalltalk. IIRC Seaside has been ported to the Gemstone VM, which is part of their Gemstone/S OODBMS. This has much better thread support than Ruby, so it is a better back-end for a high-volume system. This might be a good reason to take a close look at it.
Reasons to learn Smalltalk:
It's a really, really nice programming environment. Once you've got your head around it (it tends to be a bit of a culture shock for people used to C++ or Java) you'll find it to be a really good environment to work in. Even a really crappy smalltalk like the Old Digitalk ones I used is a remarkably pleasant system to use. Many of the old XP and O-O guru types like Kent Beck and Martin Fowler cut their teeth on Smalltalk back in the day and can occasionally be heard yearning for the good old days in public (Thanks to Frank Shearer for the citation, +1) - Agile development originated on this platform.
It's one of the most productive development platforms in history.
Several mature implementations exist and there's a surprisingly large code base out there. At one point it got quite trendy in financial market circles where developer productivity and time-to-market is quite a big deal. Up until the mid 1990s it was more or less the only game in town (With the possible exception of LISP) if you wanted a commercially supported high-level language that was suitable for application development.
Deployment is easy - just drop the image file in the appropriate directory.
Not really a reason, but the Gang of Four Book uses Smalltalk for quite a few of their examples.
Reasons not to learn Smalltalk:
It's something of a niche market. You may have trouble finding work. However if you are producing some sort of .com application where you own the servers this might not be an issue.
It's viewed as a legacy system by many. There is relatively little new development on the platform (although Seaside seems to be driving a bit of a renaissance).
It tends not to play nicely with traditional source control systems (at least as of the early-mid 90's when I used it). This may or may not still be the case.
It is somewhat insular and likes to play by itself. Python or Ruby are built for integration from the ground up and tend to be more promiscuous and thus easier to integrate with 3rd party software. However, various other more mainstream systems suffer from this type of insularity to a greater or lesser degree and that doesn't seem to impede their usage much.
Well, since you mentioned me by name, I feel I should chime in.
As I said in that podcast interview, and as I have repeatedly demonstrated in my blog at http://MethodsAndMessages.vox.com/, this is "the year of smalltalk". And having now done Smalltalk advocacy for the past ten months, I can see that it really is happening. More customers are turning to Smalltalk and Seaside, and the Smalltalk vendors are all working hard to capture this new influx of attention. More larger Smalltalk conferences are being planned. More job postings are being posted. More blog postings are being made.
If you turn to Smalltalk today, you are not alone. There are many others who are out there as well.
Edit
Well, a number of years later, I'm now recommending Dart instead. It's a great language originated by Google but now owned by an ECMA committee. It runs serverside in node.js style, but also clientside in modern browsers by transpiling to JavaScript. Lots of good books, blogs, help channels, IDE support, public live pastebin. I think it's definitely got legs... enough so that I'm writing courseware to teach it onsite or online, and I'm pretty sure there's a book or two in the works from me. And Gilad Bracha, an old-time Smalltalker is a major contributor to the design, so there's a lot of Smalltalk in Dart.
Smalltalk is a good language to learn, and the great thing is that it only takes a day to do it. It's a lot more than just an academic language. People are building huge, scalable, replicable applications handling billions of dollars. They just don't talk about it much. See, for instance, GemStone and Orient Overseas Container Lines:
A Shipping Industry Case Study.
Seaside is a good reason to learn Smalltalk, but I don't think you'll find it orders of magnitude better than Rails.
The thing that convinced me was GemStone. I really like Gemstone's GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Smalltalk, Seaside). The killer part of that is GemStone, which handles all the object persistence for you mostly without you thinking about it. Seeing some of their demos and hearing about what people are doing with GemStone reset my idea of what "big application" meant.
The part that bugs me the most about Rails is the object-relational mapping. That's nothing against Ruby because it sucks just as hard in GLORP (which handles ActiveRecord for Smalltalk), or Perl, or anything else. Mapping objects to database tables is just painful. With GemStone, thinking about the database disappears, so the work with the database disappears too. It's like a huge stone (or a troop of monkeys) is taken off my back.
> couldn't find a Smalltalk development environment that didn't cost both arms and a leg
Google - free smalltalk
Cincom Smalltalk, Squeak, GNU Smalltalk
Learning Smalltalk will give you a grounding in object oriented software development from the perspective of the man who invented OO (Alan Kay). The idea of a overlapping windowing environment came from Smalltalk.
A stumbling block to learning Smalltalk is that it is a message passing system with a strange syntax for flow control like:
i < 60
ifTrue: [ self walk ]
It has a very mature class library that has a consistency I've not seen too many places. The class library in all environments (even commercial Smalltalks) has available source which allows you to learn from the masters of the language. When programming Smalltalk, I always ask the question how is it done in the environment.
Smalltalk is generally implemented in an image which is a live environment for all the objects in your system.
The interactive debugger really seperates Smalltalk from Ruby.
Seaside is the web development framework and has given Smalltalk a new spotlight. It is a continuation based environment that allows for intra-hit debugging and a smooth Rich Client type development experience (top application flow can be designed in a single method). It's integration with script.aculo.us has been done in such a way that it is easily called from within Smalltalk.
Nigel, one quote I have is this:
Although it's now a long time since I did anything with it, I nominate Smalltalk, I still haven't come across anything quite like it for being able to transfer thoughts into computer code. It's not just the language: It's the wonderful browser environment, the libraries, and the culture of writing clear, well-designed code as quickly as anything else can crank out spaghetti. When the participants at JavaOne were extolling how Java was so much more productive than anything else, I needed a brown paper bag. Oh well, back to sorting out my classpaths... -- Martin Fowler (Software Development Magazine, Jan 2001)
I found it here.
Would disagree with the poster who reckons you wouldn’t use Smalltalk for large apps – that’s precisely where it shines. But I have created fairly groovy (note lowercase) prototype apps in under a week too.
I learned OO in ST starting in 92, incredibly glad I did so. It gave me a real background in OO. Thinking in classes. No types. ST has a real emphasis on messaging. If you want to know something send an object a message and get an answer. IMHO, the ethos and the IDE really encourage you to do the right thing with your coupling and cohesion.
In my Java day job, I’m stuck with files, generics, IDE’s like eclipse that are orders of magnitude less productive that any ST IDE. I was using ST the only time I finished a development ahead of schedule. In fact it was so productive, and we got so much reuse I had to be moved off to another project, as I had nothing to do! (Ok, maybe I could have spent time learning to estimate...)
Download squeak, find a good book and play. Only downside is that if your day gig is using Java or C#, you’ll end up wishing you could use ST. You’d get home sooner.
Chris Brooks
I recommend everybody to learn Lisp (Scheme) or Smalltalk.
Smalltalks have wonderful IDEs which you dont want to miss once you got over the culture shock. And yes, there are more than one free ones: Squeak, Dolphin, Smalltalk/X, and Visualworks (Non-Comercial).
Lisp may be even cleaner in its mathematic foundation, though.
regards
PS: actually I recommend learning both !
I do not know Ruby..
Smalltalk is a pure OO language. If you feel the need to really understand OO, and not just the simulated OO of most popular 'OO' languages (like C++, Java, etc), then I would recommend that you play with smalltalk.
In smalltalk everything is an object, with attributes, behavior and meta. In the simulations you have data types that you use in your objects.
I would say play with it, you will only benefit.
I'm totally in your shoes. Im using RoR and looking into Smalltalk land. Here's some pros & cons I find important:
Pros:
Mature & stable environment
Fast development cycle
Makes you think more and write less
Cons:
Requires different thinking
Still didn't quite grasp it
It's quite funny how I got to know about Smalltalk. It was this one thing that keept popping up in Google results when searching for Lisp and Erlang stuff. One day I checked it out and was amazed with nice windows environment. Few moments later I've found Aida/Web framework. I was hooked and started learning Smalltalk through web development with this framework.
Still not quite there, but it's so damn interesting I just can't sit still... :-) I'm having fun again.
Would not start learning it if I had the time. Why not? Because it would be more productive and lucrative financially to learn C# or Java.
On the other hand if your a hobbyist, and would like to go on an archeological dig, then I'd suggest spending some time looking at the What, When, Why and how of smalltalk by researching Alan Kay. Fascinating story and an incredible person (after all, he earned the Turning Award). Then maybe play with squeak a little to get a feeling for the language. After this you might have a newly found respect/understanding of blocks, closures, and Object Oriented principles.
I know and use Smalltalk, have for about 15 years, still maintaining it, and would not recommend Smalltalk to a friend. Why not? Employment is a good thing to have and keep getting. Although you can learn a lot from Smalltalk you can't easily turn that into gainfully being employed in this day and age.
Also, you appeared to be excited over Seaside and I would assume the Seaside/GemStone partnership. I've used GemStone for quite some time and the two together are very appealing. I hope they can get the market share and momentum required to be successful.
Don't! If you really start learning it, you might not want to programm in something else anymore ever.
This may be not true, if you are a lisp programmer.
Absolutely, learn Smalltalk! This is 2015 and Smalltalk is on the rise again, thanks to Pharo. Pharo is FREE. Pharo is evolving quickly into a powerful enterprise tool. At Version 4.0, and soon to be 5.0, it has matured a great deal in just four years!
Then there's Amber, which is Smalltalk for the web. It's also FREE and evolving quickly.
Despite Smalltalk's reputation, this is not your father's Smalltalk. Modern Smalltalk is exciting and promising.
It's true that Smalltalk jobs are not (yet) plentiful. But if enough of you aggregate to a new wave of Smalltalkers, then the industry will adapt to it and we'll see wider adoption of Smalltalk in business. The question is, do you have the vision?
I was taught Smalltalk in one of the first graduate college level Object-Orient Programming courses (circa 1988). The teacher thought it best to start was a "pure" OO langauge,before moving on to a more trendy one (we did a bit of C++ at the end of the semester).
By that measure, it's still best to start with pure OO, although these days we have Java & C#, both of which are "nearly-pure" OO -- close enough that you can get by ignoring the non-OO features of them, and limiting yourself to the Pure-OO subset of the langauges.
If you want a better understanding of Extreme Programming (and even Scrum) I'd say yes.
Why impatient Java programmers need to learn Smalltalk:
http://www.dafydd.net/archive/2010/why-smalltalk-isnt-just-another-language/
I've been a software engineer for quite a few years now. I've heard people bring up Smalltalk a few times, and certainly Smalltalk has been around since about 1980, but it's one of those languages that's never seemed to make it into the software mainstream. Sort of like Objective C, CLIPS, PL/I, etc--something you may have heard of, but something that most folks have never programmed in.
I probably wouldn't take the time to learn Smalltalk unless I needed to for a particular job. I looked at some Smalltalk tutorials and examples briefly a few years back, and it looks like it has some clear advantages for certain aspects of OO programming (like the message concept seems cool). But sadly, it is not mainstream, and doesn't seem to be gaining much momentum.
This thread has become very actual for me. I'm planning for a Software migration to a web-application. It's a database based software. I'm especially checking the alternatives
1) Rails
2) Seaside
If I can get the figures for the Gemstone/S as Database, I'll consider that also. So for me it means I have to learn Smalltalk (better) than before. Because it could be that it will be my work for the next 15 years. You would (and should not) work with software you don't like for that long ;-). I've the impression Gemstone/S is one of the "killer" applications. But persistence of Objects still is a very difficult field....
1) Yes! It's always good to learn a language. If you are going to learn a language, make it a powerful, influential language that can be learnt easily and quickly.
Smalltalk remains a pre-eminent language and environment for learning OO concepts.
It is all objects, all the way down. This makes for a really consistent approach to working.
Integers are instances of Class Integer. Strings are a collection of character objects. Classes are singleton instance objects for the class they define.
Control structures work by sending get messages to instances of Class Boolean.
Even anonymous methods (blocks of code, aka blocks) are objects.
Everything is done by sending a message to an object. The syntax can be fitted on a postcard.
The clarity of the concepts and their implementation in Smalltalk mean that you can develop ways of thought which transfer directly into Java, Ruby and C#. I expect it's true for Python, too.
It's so good for making the concepts clear that a major UK University used Smalltalk to train 5,000 people a year in object-oriented computing.
Squeak 5, has just been released. It has gained major performance increases from its new Cog/Spur VM, which features with progressive garbage-collection.
Pharo 4 has a lovely clean-looking desktop theme. The next version, Pharo 5, will be released soon. It will move to using the Cog/Spur VM, it will have about 5,000 classes in the release, and additional packages of classes are readily available from the net via the Configuration Browser tool.
Squeak 5 is performant even on first-gen Raspberry Pis, and is almost 50% faster on the new $5 Raspberry Pi zero. $99 buys you a Raspberry Pi 2, screen and case - running a mature, fully feature-complete IDE.
Leading edge research is being done on co-ordinated, distributed OO systems in Smalltalk (e.g. Naiad and Spoon).
Some of the world's largest corporate databases are run on Smalltalk - including tracking of 60% of the world's shipping containers, and trading systems in the world's largest bank.
You can use Smalltalk as a sort of super-powered CoffeeScript, writing in Amber Smalltalk and transpiling to JavaScript, running in the browser.
Squeak, Pharo, and Amber are all Free, Open-source, open-licenced languages and environments.
Squeak and Pharo provide write-once, run anywhere facilities for MacOS, Windows and Linux. (Possibly RiscOS, too).
Dolphin Smalltalk is targetted firmly at native Windows look-and-feel, and lets you compile closed .exes of your finished work for distribution to end users. Further development of Dolphin by the vendor has stopped, but it is completely functional, and, like all Smalltalks, designed to be massively extensible. (Did I mention that Pharo now has 5,000 classes, compared to Squeak's 3,000? Pharo is a fork of Squeak 3.9)
**There is a How-to guide for installing and starting Squeak, Amber, Pharo, Cuis and Dolphin at: **
http://beginningtosmalltalk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/how-to-get-smalltalk-up-and-running.html
The Seaside web framework runs on Squeak and on Pharo. It's a wonderful mature tool, as is the more traditional AidaWeb framework.
VisualAge, VisualWorks and Gemstone all provide enterprise-grade robust systems. Gemstone provides an infinitely scalable object database with transactions and persistence.
2) Yes - I do already use it.
I learnt it via the Open University, and was immediately productive in Ruby (a copy of the Pickaxe book and the library reference by my side). It helped me enormously with Java, and with Xerox Moo-code.
I have just returned to it to write apps to control manage and distribute responsive, massively multi-platform mobile apps.
I expect that soon I'll be re-writing my JavaScript mobile apps using Amber, too.
I don't really know what you're looking for.
If you are looking for a different language to write in, I'd think that would depend heavily on the libraries available. I know neither Ruby nor Smalltalk, but it seems likely that the most efficient way to write Ruby on Rails-sorts of applications may not be Smalltalk.
If you are looking to learn the ideas behind Ruby, this might be a very good move. I don't have anything quantitative, but I always felt better about using tools (such as language systems) if I knew more than just the tools, if I kmew the ideas behind them or how they worked.
If you want to learn different sorts of object-oriented languages, you might well want to learn Smalltalk (if it differs significantly from Ruby), something like Java or C++, and perhaps also the Common Lisp Object System.
If you just want to learn something different, Smalltalk may well be a good choice. I'd also suggest Common Lisp, and other people will doubtless have other suggestions (can you get a good Forth system nowadays?).
Yes, I'm interested in it. Tried to start once already, but couldn't find a Smalltalk development environment that didn't cost both arms and a leg.