Welcome, intrepid voyager. You have somehow landed in my Smalltalk learning blog. As I work through the process of learning to program in Smalltalk I will be writing about my experiences here.
I am a teacher at the City College of San Francisco, where I’ve been teaching Perl, Ruby and PHP since 2000. As an inquisitive person, I’m always interested in new ideas. In this case, an old idea and a new idea — Smalltalk and Seaside— have caught my eye. In this blog I will document my trials and tribulations as I learn Smalltalk.
By the way, I don’t pretend to know, at the beginning, which parts of Smalltalk are the good parts. I realize that the most languages have good parts. And every language has its own set of gotchas. It will be fun learning just how good Smalltalk is.
My plan is to learn enough Smalltalk to teach a course at CCSF. Of course, that idea presupposes that there will be enough students to support a class. One of the obstacles any language, new or old, must face is the tendency of people to run with the herd (Java, PHP, Python, etc) and to shun languages that don’t have name recognition: Smalltalk and Lisp, for example. I believe that Seaside is a killer app for Smalltalk, and I will be focusing my efforts on building an application as part of my learning regimen.
Happy hacking…
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I support your efforts in adding Smalltalk to the herd of languages taught at CCSF. CCSF has the responsibility to provide the necessary technological hedge that will help its students contribute to the fast coming Web 3.0. Apple has created a whole nonexistent market place with its iphone apps in 2009. How many years will it take for CCSF to have classes in Objective-C a language influenced by Smalltalk and widely use to develop the iphone apps?
Great news. CCSF will be offering an iPhone develoment course in the Fall of 2010—if the current state budget crisis permits. We’ve been looking at this for since the summer. BTW, our department is rife with professional Objective-C programmers; one instructor was worked as a programmer at NeXT.
We’re doing our best at CCSF to bring in new courses, but we’re working under the mandate to cut back 12% of our course sections this year and in 2011. We doing the best we can with what we have to work with.
You probably want to use the Seaside tutorials by James Foster: http://glass.gemstone.com/tutorial.html.