From: Michael Fellinger <m.fellinger@...>
Date: 2006-12-06T15:32:26+09:00
Subject: Re: smalltalk resources for ruby hackers?

On Wednesday 06 December 2006 07:23, Giles Bowkett 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