Club Squeak

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay @ Creative Think Seminar 1982

Related Links:
Water and Ice

Intel The Software Company

Cisco The Software Company

In any Squeak  environment, the Object Explorer can help you learn how things work. The following link has a step-by-step, illustrated example:

Often in Squeak, whenever there’s interaction with the UI, the most direct path to understanding starts with the morph you are clicking. You can cmd-click(Mac) or right-click (Windows) on any morph to bring up a set of icons called a halo.

Getting Started With Croquet 

* For folk not familiar with Star Wars, see the Force 

Ramon Leon makes some good points about the “out of the box” Squeak UI and I agree that marketing is important. However, like most folk relatively new to Smalltalk/Squeak and strangely many who’ve been around a long time, he’s been misinformed about why Smalltalk isn’t more widely used. Smalltalk was not beaten by either Java or Ruby, but rather failed to address the needs these languages did in a timely manner. It may be a while before I find time to finish up the long, detailed essay on this topic that’s been sitting dormant so for now let me put it in a nutshell.

It is a matter of record that Java was not originally designed to compete with Smalltalk as a generic application development tool, but rather C/C++ for set top devices. Before Java’s public release, the momentum in the corporate world had clearly shifted to Smalltalk over C++. Java wasn’t publicly released until 1995 and early in the year didn’t even enter into the language discussion. Nor was Java mentioned when Digitalk and ParcPlace merged later that year. In fact, at the end of 1995, IBM which had only recently licensed Java was still touting VisualAge over Java for the web! At the time the Java Enterprise Edition Platform spec was announced in 1998, none of the incompatible Smalltalk offerings from a stagnant ParcPlace-Digitalk, an indifferent IBM, a research-oriented Squeak, or single platform Object-Arts was really focused on delivering internet aware solutions. Java and Ruby merely stepped in and filled a vacuum.

Update:  It is true that ParcPlace-Digitalk’s VisualWave was a powerful offering in some respects. However, it was an expensive and all-encompassing approach with no free stepping stones or incremental building blocks. In contrast, Java developers could download the JDK, explore and learn.

When you look at the 35 languages that rank above Smalltalk on the TIOBE Index(also relevant is O’Reilly’s Programming Language Trends ), marketing doesn’t really seem to be a primary differentiator. If one is seeking to expand the use of Smalltalk, I think it’s necessary to broaden the context ultimately to include the evolution of hardware and also give more weight to it’s ancestral meme. Many of the languages ranked ahead of Smalltalk owe a great deal of their success to ideas made popular by Smalltalk. Things that can be done to achieve more widespread use of Smalltalk will be the topic of my next “Smalltalk Reloaded” entry but I’ll say in closing that embracing Sun Labs Lively Kernel is one of them.

Steve Wessels has a very thorough, step-by-step example of how to develop Squeak applications.

The Squeak browser has what are called “optional buttons” which I find indispensable.

Each of these buttons saves you at least one click and most cases several. The “inheritance” button has color codings which provide information that’s very time consuming to get at. In my experiences, one almost always needs a few of these capabilities during a programming session. They do take up screen real estate but for many it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

In order to show these buttons you need to select “optional buttons” in the browsing section of preferences. If you don’t already know how to do this read the rest of this entry. Read the rest of this entry »