I’ve been coding in Ruby almost exclusively for about six months, and
playing with advanced features. My background is a little Ruby, a
little Python, a little Java, and a ton of Perl. Any advice on
learning Smalltalk, going from Ruby?
“Giles B.” [email protected] wrote in message
news:[email protected]…
I’ve been coding in Ruby almost exclusively for about six months, and
playing with advanced features. My background is a little Ruby, a
little Python, a little Java, and a ton of Perl. Any advice on
learning Smalltalk, going from Ruby?
Start by downloading some free (and completely legal!) books here:
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html
Practical Smalltalk (shafer and Ritz) and Smalltalk an Introduction
(Hopkins
and Horan) are pretty good introductions. For a simple introduction you
might also find a couple of tutorials which I wrote (for Squeak or
Dolphin
Smalltalk - both of which are free) to be of use:
http://www.bitwisemag.com/copy/programming/smalltalk/smalltalk1.html
http://www.bitwisemag.com/copy/programming/smalltalk/dolphintutorial.html
best wishes
Huw C.
http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005
gracias!
On 12/5/06, Michael F. [email protected] wrote:
I found most other implementations to be very heavily biased towards GUI-based
quite as ‘hacky’ (in a good sense) but very powerful (i still dream of full
to do things.
However, this is entirely a matter of taste i guess…
The GUI focus is one of the things I’ve found tricky. Also, I’ve been
playing with the Cincom implementation, and I’m not that into it. I
was planning to switch to Squeak. I know that Seaside appears to have
been written in the context of Squeak. I didn’t know a GNU
implementation existed, that’s pretty cool. Have people been able to
run it on various platforms?
Download Dolphin, go through the whole tutorial, and ask questions to
the kind folks in the Dolphin newsgroup.
On Wednesday 06 December 2006 07:23, Giles B. wrote:
I’ve been coding in Ruby almost exclusively for about six months, and
playing with advanced features. My background is a little Ruby, a
little Python, a little Java, and a ton of Perl. Any advice on
learning Smalltalk, going from Ruby?
One thing i really like is the GNU Smalltalk implementation, it has a
nice
REPL that you can use from the command-line, a nice set of examples and
libraries and you can run it like ruby gst somefile.st rather than
having
to load a whole image that you keep on modifying.
I found most other implementations to be very heavily biased towards
GUI-based
developing… coming from PHP/Ruby it doesn’t fit my workflow very much,
so i
found gst very nice (YMMV :).
A rather good tutorial covering all the basics can be found at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/gst-manual/gst.html
Most tutorials are for graphical interfaces though, especially for
squeak you
can find lots of ressources.
Overall, i really like smalltalk, it’s like the older brother of ruby,
not
quite as ‘hacky’ (in a good sense) but very powerful (i still dream of
full
reflection in ruby, having sourcecode for everything at hand like:
st> String sourceCodeAt: #asString!
'asString
“But I already am a String! Really!”
^self
’
I found the current implementation still a bit academic though… the
basics
haven’t changed since years and it would be great to have more pragmatic
ways
to do things.
However, this is entirely a matter of taste i guess…
^manveru
On 12/5/06, Giles B. [email protected] wrote:
I’ve been coding in Ruby almost exclusively for about six months, and
playing with advanced features. My background is a little Ruby, a
little Python, a little Java, and a ton of Perl. Any advice on
learning Smalltalk, going from Ruby?
The SmallTalk Best Practices by Beck book gets high praise all over
the place, even from Ruby or Java programmers who aren’t planning on
learning Smalltalk. I’ve wanted to buy it for a long time but the $60
price has kept on the wishlist for a long time…
amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/dp/013476904X
- rob
Giles B. wrote:
-snip-
The GUI focus is one of the things I’ve found tricky. Also, I’ve been
playing with the Cincom implementation, and I’m not that into it.
Please be more specific - maybe it’s a problem we should all know
about, maybe it’s not a problem just a matter of learning something
different.
I was planning to switch to Squeak. I know that Seaside appears to have
been written in the context of Squeak. I didn’t know a GNU
implementation existed, that’s pretty cool. Have people been able to
run it on various platforms?
comp.lang.smalltalk would be a good place to ask those kinds of
question.
On 12/7/06, Rob S. [email protected] wrote:
amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/dp/013476904X
Yow, are you kidding? That looks awesome! That $60 will probably turn
into a lot more, if it makes me a better programmer. Merry Christmas
to me!! 
I’ve read this book and can recommend it highly. I’m a little skeptical
of
‘best practices’ books, but this one stands apart. I especially like the
fact that he has no qualms about giving contradictory pieces of advice
one of the best passages in the book goes something like “Now I know I
told
you that direct variable access is good, but here I’m telling you the
opposite - just ignore that other crazy bastard…”
This is what a best practice book should be.
Mushfeq.