Dynamic Stockholm News
There was a bunch of Smalltalk at the recent "Dynamic Stockholm" event - Martin Vilcans has a pretty good writeup of his impressions. I particularly like this:
Björn Eiderbäck’s final talk about Smalltalk was inspiring. Smalltalk is a nice language. For good or bad, it has the idea that it is not only a programming language, but a complete environment. You don’t just edit Smalltalk in a text editor and compile it on the command line. The development environment and the runtime is tightly coupled in a way that provides some very nice dynamic features for development and debugging. At the same time, you’re very much tied to the environment, so if you don’t like its text editor for example, you’re not going to be happy. The whole idea is perhaps too different, especially if you’re a text editor and command-line person. For example, Björn briefly showed the built-in version control of the Smalltalk environment, something that I would prefer to use an external tool for. (Here I admittedly express the kind of conservatism that suppresses progress.)
That's a pretty good summation of how a lot of people see Smalltalk - very cool, but.... they want to use external tools. I went through a phase where I really thought that would be a good idea, but I'm back to being unsure.
Smalltalk is the image - if you lose that, I'm not really sure that you have Smalltalk any longer.
Update: More here.
