Small Thoughts for a Quiet World.

SmallTalk Is Latin

My first day of high school I walked into Latin class. I had chosen Latin for my mandatory foreign language because I'm a stereotypical Gen-X guy: I didn't want to be in a popular class. I (rightly) guessed that there wouldn't be all that many people in Latin, they'd mostly choose “mainstream” foreign language credits like Spanish or French.

The teacher got up and said, “You're never going to need to speak Latin.”

Which...I mean, we all knew that.

“Not because Latin is dead, but because it's only used by a very few people in its original form. But what you are learning here is the why behind so many other languages. Learning Latin will make you a better speaker of English. And if you decide to learn French, or Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian, you'll have an easier time with those languages as well.”

I spent three years studying Latin. My third year there were only two of us in the course, so we met at the same time as the Latin II students. I'm eternally grateful that our teacher had us teach them from time to time.

Fast forward to the early 2000s when I was a sole developer at a bookstore. The management team discovered that they suddenly had a software developer, and one of my first projects out of the gate saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars in manual computation time. So they more or less let me do my own thing, leaving me as the goose that laid golden eggs. I used that freedom to teach myself...well, lots of things. Since nobody else knew what I should be doing, I wrote apps in every language I wanted to learn. I wrote Ruby on Rails apps. I wrote an app or two in Adobe AIR (it seemed like a good idea at the time, okay?) I wrote a bunch of PHP and thus paved the way for a number of future jobs.

And I stumbled across SmallTalk.

At the time I was on a windows machine, so the version I discovered was Dolphin . I had an instant affinity for the language. I love SmallTalk's insistence that everything is an object, including classes. That the entire system is sitting there waiting for messages to get passed around.

Since then I've worked in a number of real software development jobs, and I've used the languages that my (more tech-savvy) bosses required me to use. But I've recently been playing with SmallTalk again for fun. And now that I have experience with more modern languages it's striking how clearly SmallTalk's DNA is wound into so many modern systems. Some fun examples:

Why Should I Learn SmallTalk?


At the very least, You will gain the benefit my Latin teacher offered. Learning SmallTalk will make you a better “speaker” of all those other languages, because you get a glimpse of where some of your favorite (or least-favorite) features came from.

Just like Latin still has a few people who actually speak it (mostly in Rome), there are still jobs in professional SmallTalk. There's even a “preferred” by whom? web application stack, called GLASS (GemTalk, Linux, Apache, Seaside, SmallTalk) that you can use to write real websites with all the modern bells and whistles.

But you're more likely to get hired to write or maintain websites in PHP and Laravel, or Java/Spring or Ruby on Rails or Python or....

Even in this case, SmallTalk can still be useful to you for your actual job, because prototyping an application in SmallTalk is fast. The general process is:

  1. Grab the latest image for your favorite flavor of SmallTalk
  2. Open it
  3. Write some tests
  4. Write your code from those tests

You don't need to mess around with setting up your toolchain and build process, there isn't a build process. Code is live instantly, all the time. Package management is included, but most of the packages you need will be included by default in your new image, up to and including version control (with or without git) and deployment tools.

This is because people have spent more than 40 years refining and polishing the SmallTalk-80 paradigm into something very clean and easy to use. Apple poured a lot of time (and some money) into Squeak before finally turning it open source. The Pharo project seeks to move SmallTalk forward, even if they don't exactly call it SmallTalk any more. Most of what you want to do is easy to do in SmallTalk. Many people have done parts of your new idea. Then they created elegant packages to help you out. Then they documented those packages and created a test suite for them to boot, because that's what “good SmallTalk” code looks like. The pace is very different than the endless glut of fancy new JavaScript frameworks; it's not uncommon to use a package that is decades old, with only a few thoughtful changes over the intervening years. So you can sketch out your new idea in SmallTalk, starting with the tests, and figure out if your idea was sound. Then you've got a huge boost on creating it in your employer's development stack of choice.

Thoughts? Tell me about them!
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