A real talk about smalltalk
This is a great post. I completely understand the revulsion when loading Squeak for the first time (esp. if you get Squeak 3.9 from your Linux distro). Like the author here, I feel that seeing Squeak 4.3+ or any Pharo image is a huge relief after using the coloring book releases of Squeak 3, with the drag and drop scripting tools everywhere.
And like the author, I have to say a dozen nice things about the debugger. Really the power tool that separates Smalltalk from any other language. Why doesn't gdb have an editor, compiler, and on-demand dynamic linker built in as a standard feature? I can think why.
He links also to 10 reasons why I'm using smalltalk as a starting point for his investigations, and points to James Robertson's screencasts at Smalltalk for you as being a useful jumpstart into using the system. I really hate screencasts, since I want to click on the 'desktop' but only end up pausing the video! But Robertson's continuing efforts at education are a treasure, and deserve a wide audience.
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