On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Rudolf Olah omouse@gmail.com wrote:
Apparently the Toronto Smalltalk Group has put together something called Smalltalk TV. I just spotted the article in Dr Dobb's Journal
http://www.ddj.com/architect/220100617
And the website itself:
I hope this means Chris Cunnington is moving from being excited at the possibilities of Smalltalk to being excited at what he's doing with it.
The last I'd heard, it was much more the former.
I have long found Smalltalk to be interesting in concept, but excruciatingly painful in practice, as the whole "objects all the way down" model means you have to build a whole infrastructure in order to get *anything* to work. That is, you have to figure out the integration between the little "hello_cruel_world" method I'm trying to create and the entirety of the Smalltalk environment.
If the *only* Lisps in existence were Lisp machines, then Lisp might suffer the same.
It doesn't; I can easily run a REPL on pretty well any sort of system (newer than a Z-80 :-)) and I don't generally need to figure out the whole "Lisp environment" in order to load a bit of Lisp from a file on my filesystem.
Genera always sounded cool, but it might be the same scary integration process as fighting to get accustomed to Squeak.
Every couple of years, I install Squeak briefly, amaze myself that the web browser gets out of the VM into the network, and then promptly turf it because I haven't the patience to struggle thru realigning all my thought processes to use *their* editor and *their* class manager and so forth.
A couple years ago, other Chris did a talk for TLUG on how exciting the Seaside framework was; unfortunately, doing simple stuff like "where do I serve up some bits of static content" seemed about as difficult as the wacky dynamic stuff that's hard to conceptualize. The "hello world" bit was too much to explain in an hour, and there's something bad when that's the case.