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I'm starting to learn Smalltalk. What's the best OS (in terms of having more and better tools) and tools for development?

Benjamin Pollack
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Nathan Campos
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5 Answers5

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Most Smalltalks are OS agnostic, even more, you can develop on one and deploy on another OS. Such are Squeak and friends, VisualWorks, Smalltalk/X, VA Smalltalk. On the other hand you have a Dolphin Smalltalk, which is Windows only.

About tools, probably the most professional and with best tools is VisualWorks, which is not open source but it has a non-commercial license for free until you start earning money on it. In open source world there is a Squeak fork named Pharo, which is making a good progress exactly on the tools front.

Janko Mivšek
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You can use whatever OS you are most comfortable with for the more popular versions of Smalltalk: VisualWorks, Squeak, VA Smalltalk, and Smalltalk/X. There are Windows specific Smalltalks if you really want to tie into that platform: ObjectStudio is Vista Certified, and Dolphin was built for Windows.

As to learning Smalltalk itself - I'm most familiar with the resources available for learning VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, and Squeak.

For VisualWorks and ObjectStudio, visit http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com, and specifically, you might want to check out these pages:

Smalltalk Daily - A daily screencast focusing on an aspect of VW or OS

Industry Misinterpretations - a weekly podcast focused on Smalltalk (the entire spectrum of Smalltalk, not just Cincom's offerings)

Tutorials - There are a number of tutorials on the Cincom Smalltalk site, both in video form and in step by step html page form.

For Squeak, start at http://squeak.org. You'll find links to tutorials, free books, and examples.

Good luck, and feel free to contact me personally.

jarober
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SQUEAK on windows.

Dinesh
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Best smalltalk for Windows, they say, is Dolphin Smalltalk.

There's a free Community Edtion (which is not cripled as I understand it, just some tools aren't there) and the Pro.

Now, the Pro edition costs $225. Where can you get so much bang for such a small ammount of money?

People are skeptical about Smalltalk. People are, in fact, afraid of learning it. But, in this day and age, there are dozens of languages to pick from. Smalltalk, Smalltalk vendors and their clients have been around for a long time, and offer way more mature than most languages in terms off tools.

jacques
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Pharo is another good option. It is fast, easy to use and open source. The "one click image" lets you use it seamlessly on Windows, Mac and Linux (you can store it on a USB key). And recent advances in the Squeak VM (Pharo uses the same VM as Squeak) development led to Cog, a very fast VM (with just in time compilation).

Géal
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