One interesting thing for me was that the Smalltalk syntax reminded me a little bit of Ruby. We spent a little bit of time with irb open as well as the Smalltalk environment and compared what the code would look like for a few simple expressions in the different languages. Ruby seemed a little bit easier to understand for some of the expressions but I guess it has probably been influenced syntax wise by Smalltalk. To give a simple example that we tried out, this is how you’d print the values 1-10 to the screen: In Smalltalk: _~smalltalk 1 to: 10 do: [:i | Transcript cr; show: (i printString)]. _~ In Ruby: _~ruby (1..10).each { |i| puts i } _~

We were following a simple introduction to Squeak, an open source implementation of Smalltalk. We were actually using Visual Works/Cincom Smalltalk which seems to differ a little bit. For example there was no 'asString' method on integer when we tried to execute the following bit of code: _~smalltalk Transcript show: (1 asString) _~ It leads to the error: _~text Unhandled exception: Message not understood: #asString _~ Instead we needed to use 'printString like this: _~smalltalk Transcript show: (1 printString) _~ I’m sure there are probably some other differences but we only tried a few examples at the dojo.

The idea of the development environment being the same as the environment where the code runs was quite strange for me but we saw some benefits of it even in the small amount of code we wrote. On making one of our many syntax errors the IDE popped up with a message asking whether we wanted to debug that piece of code on the fly. Pretty cool if we’d understood the stack trace that followed a bit better!

I haven’t looked into the type systems of other languages that closely but I was quite surprised that looking the type of the value '1' was 'SmallInteger' - it was much more strongly typed than I had expected. The ability to delve into the code of objects within the environment is really cool and we came across quite a bit of code which intrigued us to want to learn more.

The intention for this session wasn’t actually to learn Smalltalk the language, as I don’t think dojos are great for doing that, but rather to try and understand the concepts behind all expressions being about sending a message to an object which for me is what object orientation is all about. Chatting with Dave about object oriented design he spoke highly of Smalltalk as being the language where he learnt a lot about this and a couple of colleagues have said the same thing as well.