programming musings

I’m sure this is old hat for all Smalltalk practitioners, or anybody with Planet Smalltalk in her feed list, but here’s a great way of learning a bit more about one of the most elegant programming languages ever:Smalltalk daily. James Robertson, Cincom Smalltalk‘s Product Manager, is one of the few guys around with the word manager in their job title that knows how to program; and he’s sharing his knowledge on a daily basis in the screencast series linked above. He started last month, and has managed to live up his self-imposed, tight scheduled of one post per day. Naturally enough, he uses Visual Works for his demos, but many of the videos are about generic Smalltalk features, available in other implementationa.For instance, see his explanation on Smalltalk variables and inspectors, or this review on classes and inheritance. (As an aside, there’s also an interesting podcast series on Smalltalk conducted by James… i wonder where he finds the time!)

Smalltalk environments are one of the most amenable to video demonstrations: the whole object graph of your running environment is there for you to explore in real time, and there’s lots of interesting ways to interact with it [0]. As a matter of fact, everybody seems to want to show you his favorite Smalltalk: see for instance Stefan Ducasse’s collection of Squeak videos or this nice flash demo of how to do TDD in Dolphin Smalltalk (one of the few Windows programs i wish i had in Mac or Linux).

I was trying to imagine an equivalent video on C or Java development and couldn’t stop yawning ;-). Enjoy!

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[0] See this blog entry by Cees de Grot for an enthralling account of Smalltalk’s lifeliness.