Every time I see something about Smalltalk, I see references to Croquet (and Seaside, but Croquet even more it seems). I finally decided to see what it is today. It’s built on Squeak (a popular free Smalltalk implementation) and it seems to be a development platform for creating collaborative 3-D virtual worlds. I downloaded it and tried it out. A couple of minutes into it, I seemed to be a gigantic rabbit in a virtual field and I think I was getting shot in the back of the head with a laser. Trippy. Not immediately obvious how to navigate and sort of scary.
I’m always dubious of 3D virtual worlds, and I say that despite playing WoW. 🙁
Squeak is pretty cool, although ironically what I find most disappointing about it is its GUI. It’s “different” and it seems like it’s unecessarily so. There’s a project to bind it to wxWindows which I should try at some point.
In general, you really ought to try Smalltalk. It’s the one true programming language…. or wait, wasn’t that LISP? ….no I think it was Scheme …nope it was ML …no OCaml ….no wait….Occam ….or was that Modula-3 ..well, it can’t be Ada, that’s for sure….. Damn, I’ve forgotten what the one true programming language is.
Yep, I’d like to learn more about Smalltalk since it’s one of the one true programming languages. What’s a good book or tutorial for learning Smalltalk?
One that’s targeted at an experienced programmer?
As opposed to an 8 year old, which is what a lot of the Squeak stuff I’ve seen looks targeted to…