Smalltalk is an amazing and legendary language
 divulged to humans by Prometheus. This angered the
 gods enough they condemned him to refactor a big ball
 of Hadean mud for all eternity.

 Smalltalk can only be used by humans with a psi power
 greater than 17, with adjustments. Smalltalk
 programmers do not type, they lean their heads towards
 their monitors, and meditate. The more advanced
 programmers do not even need monitors.

 Smalltalk responds to their thought patterns by
 testing itself, coding itself, and refactoring itself.
 When humans with low psi powers need to _see_
 Smalltalk, it manifests itself as a physical avatar of
 a series of almost meaningless ^[]: characters,
 interspersed with intention-revealing selectors.
 Squinting at these symbols will reveal a Mandala
 symbolizing the 7th Chakra of the nearest programmer
 who is romantically involved, if any.

 Smalltalk itself generates its own refactoring
 browser, test rig, IDE, and 3D graphics subsystems as
 you write your program with it. So as you structure
 your program, Smalltalk uses that structure to
 generate the refactoring browser needed to refactor
 its structure. This is why some advanced Smalltalk
 Gurus know the best way to program Smalltalk is to
 simply pick up the CPU and shake it.

 The only reason such an obviously superior language
 has not taken over the world is because it interferes
 with the plans of the astral Lizard People, and their
 avatars and representatives among us. These can be
 recognized by their MCSD plaques, their years of
 experience writing distributed application servers
 that serve application distributors, and - especially
 - their books with code samples in Java.

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.

The code is on SqueakSource: kilana.unibe.ch:8888/ObjectiveCBridge/ObjectiveC-avi.70.mcz You can get a prebuilt plugin (for use with Ian’s 3.7 VM) here: beta4.com/~avi/ObjectiveCPlugin The browser demo can be run with "CCBrowser test". It requires this nib file: beta4.com/~avi/CCBrowser.tgz You need to untar that and place it inside Contents/Resources/English.lproj of your VM application bundle. I’m announcing this partly because I’ve run out of steam on it for now, and am hoping someone else will take it the next step of building UIs for the various Squeak tools (browsers, debuggers, workspaces, inspectors, etc) in Cocoa. A custom NSMorphicView would also be cool, although might be pretty tricky. Anyway, if someone does try to take this on, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions they have about the underlying bridge code.

And it is important to consider that once you commit to, say, iterating over an entire file, that the file must be reasonably small anyway to get decent performance. The same issue exists with collections. Who cares if collect: creates an extra collection or if WriteStream wastes space at the end of a long underlying collection; if these concerns are really so important then probably this huge collection should not exist and/or you should not be iterating over the entire thing anyway.

To put it very simply: you just can not expect a program to work on large data structures just because you micro optimized everywhere. If you want to handle large data structures then it takes planning and specialized algorithms and test cases. If you are not going to put in that effort, then don’t sweat the small stuff. It is very liberating to code with an eye towards correctness and towards algorithmic performance, and not to worry about getting down the constant factor. It seems to lead to lower stress, faster code production, and fewer bugs generated.

 Smalltalk With Style is now freely available.
 Thanks Suzanne, Ed, and Dave. This is a great book everybody should read!!

 I added the chapter 27 of Smalltalk by Example.
 I added a link to point to the book of Liu: Smalltalk, Object and Design

The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

Smalltalk is very well thought out, extremely well engineered, very flexible, and generally gives quite good performance in a multitude of situations. It’s very adaptable to many different situations, and has lots of tricks up it’s sleeve. Driving it is a bit of a paradigm shift from driving your average plane, it has some new fancy controls, but once you get the hang of it, it can be totally amazing and really fun. Even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing you can still get yourself out of a jam. Given that you’ve got a good pilot you can launch off to a quick start and really do some very heavy and impressive damage in a very short time. It also tends to perform quite impressively if you’ve got a few of them around, and easier to coordinate an army of them.

Java is pretty difficult to drive, and once you get it going in a certain direction it’s pretty hard to get it going somewhere else. It has a few turbo buttons on it so that if you really know when and where to use it, it can fly pretty well. You can surely get it going really fast if you fly it high enough and then point it straight into the ground. It’s generally not very flexible and often a real pain to deal with, but overall once you’ve got a flightplan fixed in stone you can fly it reasonably well and run it reasonably efficiently. If you are meticulous in your planning and implementation, it can really deliver the goods. If you make some mistakes, things can go very wrong that may become almost impossible to correct. Don’t count on any big changes, quick maneuvers, or any sort of fancy tricks that just might save the day, and leave yourself a good bit of time for planning and implementation before you expect to be able to deliver the goods. If you come accross any surprise attacks or come up against an Apache hellicopter, you could be doomed.

Changes: Several bugfixes were made for the JIT compiler. A working Java-to-Smalltalk bytecode translator (which does not support networking and reflection yet) was added.

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