I first learned about Squeak on July 7, 2001, more or less accidentally when surfing for information about Smalltalk. And as explained elsewhere, Squeak is Smalltalk-80 plus Morphic.
I hold several radical opinions about Squeak and Smalltalk of which I list three:
- I believe Squeak is the most interesting thing in programming environments and programming languages that I know (which includes Basic, Pascal+Delphi, C, Java and Prolog)Let me say a little about each point:
The reason Squeak is so interesting are its environment; its capacities; its potential; and the clarity of its code. Also, as a programming environment it is without peer. (Of the other programming languages I know my order of preference is from best to worst: Prolog, Pascal, Basic, Java, C. And I am talking mainly about ease of use here.)
The Smalltalks I have seen usually did not have much good documentation coming with them, though Visual Works Non Commercial 7.2 (VWNC 7.2), which is the latest VW, does quite well. Also, the problem when I found Squeak was that there were hardly any books available about Smalltalk. This too has improved a lot, for Stéphane Ducasse - who teaches at Berne University, in Switzerland - has a fine site with about 10 Smalltalk-books in pdf-format. Here is the link - and it is very useful indeed:
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html
It is all free apart from the cost of downloading.
The best I found there were "The Art and Science of Smalltalk" and "Inside Smalltalk" - and this leads me to the last of the above points:
I do not like the Received Explanations for Smalltalk. It's a mistake to explain an essentially mathematical or logical subject in extensive animated metaphors and it looks silly. At least: That's how it struck me in 2001 and that is how it strikes me still in 2004 - though I do like Smalltalk as a language and programming environment. One reason to like the above two books best is that they are most free of animistic prose.
Even so: At least for older versions of Smalltalk, including the one incorporated in Squeak, there are now free books available, and it is a wise move - if you want to learn to program in Smalltalk - to download some books from the above url and find one you like.