Learning Smalltalk
As a hypothetical question, if one was interested in an intro to Smalltalk, what resources would you use? Assume that the test subject is very familiar with the location of the curly brace keys and has a fondness for, though not necessarily a great expertise in, parentheses. Smalltalk, Objects, and Design seems like the most likely starting place. Any others?
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Continuations in .NET?
Clemens has a question about naming:
With what I am current building we have a bit (not precisely) a notion of "tail calls"...The call to LookupMessage() doesn't return anything as a return value or through output parameters. Instead, the resulting reply message surfaces moments later at a totally different place within the same application. At the same time, the object with the method you see here, surrenders all control to the (anonymous) receiver of the reply. It's a tiny bit like Server.Transfer() in ASP.NET.This doesn't sound like a tail call to me, it sounds more like a continuation, specifically :
So, to understand continuations, assuming you really understand closures, the next thing you have to do is abandon the idea of functions that automatically return to their caller...
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
The Funk Brothers
I've been thinking the same things lately. Computers really are pretty dull, by themselves. Ditto for programming languages. You want to use these tools to DO something. I own a pretty nice table saw, but don't do much woodworking these days. It's something in the garage collecting dust and occaisionally gets used when I need to cut a piece of wood, but I haven't built a dresser or anything like that. That's how I feel about programming lately, I've got a big box of tools that I use to chop up a 2x4 from time to time.
Comments
Try downloading visual works non-commercial (full vw funcionality, no charge for non-commercial use) from http://smalltalk.cincom.com
The download comes with a good bit of material for learning.
Patrick Logan at
Learning Smalltalk
"The Art and Science of Smalltalk" by Simon Lewis. The tutorials for Cincom Smalltalk are pretty good as wellat
Download Squeak Smalltalk. It's GPL, it's very easy to install, it's written by the father of Smalltalk (Alan Kay), and it has an extremely active development community.
The only downside I can see to it is that it uses it's own widgets and doesn't seem to have a method for developing applications that use native OS widgets.
You can find out more at the Squeak Swiki page: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak
They have lots of screenshots (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3480) , and they also include links to a *very* large number of online tutorials and books (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/377), some of them Squeak specific, some of them on general Smalltalk.
Bob McCormick at
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