You know, I don’t remember who said it, but it was like ‘Smalltalk [the programming language] is like a drug… I suggest that you don’t try it’. Whoever said this aimed at the simplicity of the language, and that everything inside Squeak, a Smalltalk-80 environment, is an object. Everything can talk to everything at runtime. And wanna hear the real juicy bit? You code it once, and you bring your code to any Squeak VM. It will run. No linking. No compiling. No GCC. And no errors, once your programs runs as desired.
Intrigued by these facts, and by what is possible with it, I have decided I take it for a spin and see how far I can go. Programming languages were never really my thing… C++ to difficult, others I just didn’t get. And then, along came Smalltalk. So what is possible with it? Let me put it this way: What Blender is for 3D, that’s Squeak and Smalltalk for programming. Alright? Okay, this is possible:
- Open Croquet. A three dimensional collaborating environment much like Second Life, only better and open source
- Seaside. An advanced web development framework opening the doors for really sophisticated webapps that are based on Smalltalk.
Well these two are some of the real big players and landmarks of the language. I’m not there yet. However, I have put together a very simple and very stupid text editor, that allows for very basic functions, like writing text (no way!!), open plain text files, save them, and do some basic operations such as copy and paste. I have stupidly named this “TextPad”, and I put it up here. Trust me, it’s not much to look at, but I’m proud of this because for me this means I finally figured out a programming language.
A screen:
Here is the code in a Zip file. Decompress the Zip, then file in the other two first before filing in the Textpad.
Man, I’m really proud I figured it out… now I can go on to bigger projects.
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