Dan & Rodney:
O.K., now, just as I was salivating over the potential usefulness and joy of
using Squeak, Rodney comes along and throws water all over me. Which is it?
Who is right? I haven't yet had time to look at the actual Squeak language,
but I did see that incredibly direct and simple "kids" example of using
Squeak over at SqueakLand, or is it SmallTalkLand? EToys. And then there
is the integration of all the functionality that the Alice environment
offered, brought over into SqueakLand, or whatever it is called. Is it all
too good to be really true?
My initial impressions of this environment were that it teaches new users,
even kids, to apprehend, to comprehend the concepts involved in programming,
so that, after those things are grasped, then the cryptic programming
terminology can be introduced which, if those are introduced first, confuses
the heck out of anyone wanting to learn to program. Even if a programming
language is English-like, what is needed beyond and prior to learning lines
of "code" is really understanding sequences of events and why they need to
be in the order that they need to be in to get the machine to respond
properly. Right?
Greg,
Smalltalk and the Squeak implementation in particular are good first
programming languages. However, Smalltalk tends to be very
specialized and it is hard to produce an application that you can
give to other people to install. If you just want to learn and have
something you can play with, then Squeak isn't a bad choice. As Dan
stated, though, it is hard to produce applications that you can then
deploy elsewhere.
The main problem, in my view, is that Smalltalk environments are
pretty much unlike anything else you will encounter on your computer.
Yes, you can learn programming concepts. But, you will then likely
end up learning another language afterward to produce usable
software. Unfortunate, but that is the current state of the art. As
Smalltalk has been around for a long time, that is unlikely to change
anytime in the near future.
Programming itself is actually pretty easy. You just have to take
small steps. Understand that you won't sit down and in one night
understand how to do everything. If you work through tutorials in
your chosen environment, you will learn basic concepts in pretty much
any language you choose. After awhile, you will be able to combine
those concepts to create very involved applications. Programming is
only hard if you look at it as a whole. The pieces are generally
easy. The terminology, which you rightly complained about, comes
along with that learning.
-Rodney
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