Squeak Smalltalk is wholly unlike any other open source programming tool you’ve worked with – and mostly in good ways. Unfortunately, it’s the bad ways that make the first impression. This hands-on tutorial will help you get past the unfamiliar and the unwieldy so that you can take advantage of the elegant and productive environment that lies underneath. We’ll cover what makes Smalltalk so wonderful: the “turtles all the way down” approach to language design, the highly integrated code browsers, object inspectors, and debuggers, the accessibility (and hackability) of every piece of library code, the built-in refactoring and unit testing support, and the extreme dynamicity and portability of the environment. But we’ll also address the practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak: how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it; how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others; how to find documentation and examples; how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries; how to manage deployment.
Randal L. Schwartz (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.)
