--- layout: post title: Real talk (about Smalltalk) tags: - smalltalk - opinion - programming --- Somehow I found myself reading an interesting article on Smalltalk yesterday which led to a couple of comments in IRC: tyler: man, I am getting that "I should really learn smalltalk" feeling again tyler: everytime I get close I find myself downloading a squeak VM and then going "LOLWTF IS THIS SHIT" I said this before I left the office and somewhere in the back of my mind I kept thinking "why can't I crack Smalltalk?" This continued through most of the evening until 9 pm (21:00) rolled around and I decided that I wouldn't let that commie [Alan Kay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay) defeat me. After finding [this fantastic series of screencasts](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL61A023880D3529DB&feature=plcp) I set about learning some Smalltalk. Not enough to build anything major, but enough to really understand Smalltalk's core concepts. In exploring the world of [Squeak](http://squeak.org/), [Pharo](http://www.pharo-project.org/home) and [Amber](http://amber-lang.net/) I believe I have experienced the full spectrum of emotions that my circuits provide, all the way from unfettered rage to mild bemusement. Despite all of this, around 2 a.m. I found myself lying awake in bed wanting to marvelling at the design of the language and wanting to learn *more*. A couple of things still bug the hell out of me: * The VM concept while novel is a completely jarring experience for anybody who has done **any** programming in any other environment *ever*. * I hate mice. I also have no trackpad on my laptop which means if i'm not at my desk using a mouse-heavy program becomes painful (quite literally). Both Squeak and Pharo have this sick mouse fetish that makes me want to `（╯°□°）╯︵┻━┻` * GNU/Smalltalk feels closer to development environments that I'm familiar with, but VisualGST is incredibly buggy and I think part of what makes Smalltalk special is the integrated "live environment." ---- The things that I do **really** like however: * The integrated "live environment" is something out of programmer fairy tales. Inspect/debug/edit anything and everything? Yes please! * Everything is an object which receives messages, the syntax for conditionals helps drive it home. A boolean object can receive an `ifTrue` or an `ifFalse` message which takes a block argument. This means there is no real for `if` statements, it's all implemented with the basic Smalltalk primitives: 1 < 3 ifTrue: [Transcript show: 'Truthy!'] ifFalse: [Transcript show: 'Untruthy!'] How about a for loop? Surely the language must have a for loop! No way José! Instead an Array object just takes a `do` message with a block, fancy! #('tom' 'dick' 'harry') do: [ :each | Transcript show: ('Hello ', each); cr] * No magic, that I've seen thus far. One of my biggest criticisms of Ruby comes out of the Rails tradition of magic methods by using `method_missing` to magically generate methods on-demand, leaving a system that's abominably difficult to inspect and debug. Thus far I've not found any slight-of-hand in Smalltalk, which is a good thing. ---- I can really see where Objective-C pulled from Smalltalk having now experienced some Smalltalk myself. That said, it's rather unfortunate that C and some additional custom bits have creeped into Objective-C making it less Smalltalky than it once was. I am definitely going to continue to tinker with Smalltalk, likely with [Pharo](http://pharo-project.org/home) as my VM of choice. My only concern is that I will grow to resent the other languages I use regularly which feel dumber than a language invented almost 40 years ago. ---- **Update:** [This is the original post](http://sebastianconcept.com/brandIt/10-reasons-why-im-using-smalltalk-for-airflowing) that pushed me over the edge on tinkering with Smalltalk.