Hi dominic
What I learned over time is that Smalltalk is really adapted for people that can learn alone and are clever because it is uniform. So do not hesitate to ask and have fun.
Pay attention Squeak has some dark corners, but this is improving.
Stef
On Sunday, May 18, 2003, at 02:16 PM, Dominic Fox wrote:
What a fantastically comprehensive (if not exhaustive) set of answers. Thanks especially to Stephane for the book links.
Mention of the strategy pattern, factory methods etc. confirms something i started thinking when I started playing with class methods, namely that some of the GoF patterns make a kind of intuitive sense in Smalltalk, more so than they do in C++. I've read objections to _Design Patterns_, particularly from the FP corner, which basically argue that the implementation code for many of them is a kind of boilerplate that ought to be abstracted into the language itself ("you wouldn't need to write this over and over again if your language supported proper macros / higher order functions / closures / continuations / whatever"). These objections seem more pertinent when you look at the C++ code than they do when you look at the Smalltalk code, which is generally more concise and less contorted.
The idea of coding support for auto-accessors into the browser suggests that Smalltalk *does* give you macros, after a fashion; although you could argue that, in that case, so does VB with its IDE add-ins. It surely helps, though, that the Smalltalk syntax is so minimal (VB's is a dreadfully inconsistent clutter). I'll have to look into this some more...
Stephane's explanation of why "^ super new init" works tallies with what I'd been able to figure out by browsing over Kernel-Object and Kernel-Classes. Just having the system visible in this way certainly helps: I've spent all of two afternoons with Smalltalk so far, and already a lot of things are dropping nicely into place.
thanks again to all - I'll be back... Dominic