smalltalk resources for ruby hackers?

[Giles Bowkett]

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?

 

[Huw Collingbourne]

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 Collingbourne

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005

 

[Giles Bowkett]

gracias!

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 Collingbourne

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005

 

[Michael Fellinger]

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

 

[Giles Bowkett]

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...

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?

 

[Griff]

Download Dolphin, go through the whole tutorial, and ask questions to
the kind folks in the Dolphin newsgroup.

 

[Rob Sanheim]

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 Bowkett]

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

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!! ^_^

 

[Isaac Gouy]

Giles Bowkett 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.