Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: Starting with smalltalk

[Bram Neijt]

On 7/5/06, Mike Anderson <address@hidden> wrote:
> What you will find is that one of the major problems Smalltalk has as a
> language is that the dialects are sufficiently dissimilar that programs
> are not very portable, so the only programs you will find for GSt are
> those that were written for GSt. There are projects that aim to remedy
> this, eg. Sport. Porting Sport to gst would be a very useful project.
This is a problem, but with the growing number of architectures and
operating systems, it is just as hard for any other language
(probably).


> The other main problem, related to the above, is that the Smalltalk Way
> is image-based development, which unfortunately means that the easiest
> way to distribute programs is as images, not code.
>
> At a personal level, the main problem I have is that the packaging
> system is a bit inflexible, so splitting out a package is hard work.
I have not found anything about packaging yet, however this is the
kind of thing that will keep a language from ever getting out (even
out of a computer ;-) ).

> >> - A way of editing smalltalk files without the use of a commercial IDE
>
> This sounds as if you're thinking about commercial Smalltalks, like
> Visual Works. Actually, most other Smalltalks don't use files - you
> develop within the IDE, and code at the method level. Where the source
> code is outside of the image, it is found in a repository like Envy or
> Store, ie. a database.
I'm sorry, but if Smalltalk can't even get out of my computer, I might
just not bother to learn it at all. This does explain why I can't find
any real-life implementations on the internet (like a simple hello,
ls, find, sort or anything like that with install scripts,
documentations and comments).

Then I guess there arn't any standard commandline argument parsing
libraries in the stdlib either, right?

Greets,
 Bram

PS If all this is really like I now think it is, I can imagine why
this language never took off!