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Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

I really like the Smalltalk environments, but I have never done anything but play around in them. Don't misunderstand me, play is very important to creativity, yet I have never done a project or lengthy program in Smalltalk. I use Maxima on Android (running on ECL), and Mathematica. Jupyter notebooks are also a great way to do explorations in say Julia or Python, but to this day, Mathematica is my favorite mathematical playground. I know Stephen Wolfram gets called out a lot on HN, but the product is great in my opinion aside from the closed source mathematical routines. I'll try Len out, but it looks like graphics from the 80s compared to the drag-and-drop, code, curated internet resources of Mathematica. Watching Christopher Wolfram code in Mathematica for some fills for the movie 'Arrival' was cool too [1]. In any case, I am glad to see mathematics anywhere I can!

  [1] https://www.liveedu.tv/christopherwolfram/

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> I really like the Smalltalk environments, but I have never done anything but play around in them

Every now and then (usually when I see a post on HN about Smalltalk or Pharo in particular) I download a Pharo image and try to get started but never get particularly far. Part of the issue is that the Smalltalk image is huge and it's not obvious how to do anything nontrivial, and another part of the issue is that when I go and seek some kind of introduction so I can learn my way around I find nearly nothing.

The Pharo project has a book that's supposed to be a good introduction, but it seems to skip a lot of info and has outdated screenshots and instructions so sometimes I can't find out what I'm supposed to click on. So I give up until the next time I try.

It's a shame because everything I read about Smalltalk is so appealing, but the actual onboarding experience is too rough for me to actually go through.

Len/Mathematics runs on Cuis Smalltalk. Which has the goal of being small and easy to understand and extend. So it should be to your liking.

I found the difference of the image with the book similar to little exercises to test what I had learned so far.

Also being able to easily introspect the code of what you are interacting with is what makes Smalltalk easily discoverable in my experience.

Disclaimer: I only dabble with Smalltalk every now and then.

I'm a fan of Smalltalk, particularly the small Cuis variety. Anyway, you may be interested to know that Pharo either has or had a MOOC about learning and building things with the language. Additionally, there is an updated book I believe, at https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExa.... Some Cuis-oriented tutorials or documentation can be found at https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk-Learning/Learning-Cuis.

Happy Smalltalking! (Just don't do 'true become: false' :) )

Books are here http://files.pharo.org/books/ and the "by example" one has been recently adapted.

Next time you try something try it while chatting on Pharo's community on Slack. I'm sure you'll find a very welcoming and helpful community there. You can join here: http://pharo.org/community

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