Help - Background - Remarks - Smalltalk-80
Smalltalk is a very interesting and elegant language, but it is difficult to find a good introduction to it that doesn't kill your - at least: my - appetite by much obscure and religious repetition of the words "object", "inheritance", "encapsulation", "polymorphism" etc. These are not meaningless terms, but they are metaphors.
In "Smalltalk-80 : The Language", by Adele Goldberger and David Robson, I had to wait to the start of Chapter 8 for the statement that should have started the book:
"One of the major goals of the Smalltalk programming language is to apply a single metaphor for information processing as uniformly as possible. The Smalltalk metaphor, as described in earlier chapters, is one of objects that communicate by sending messages." (p. 119)
The stresses on "metaphor" are mine. It is true that one can hardly explain something new without using known concepts and without using some sort of metaphorical talk. But by my own tastes, most of the Smalltalk introductory literature I read is fairly to very ludicrous at many places due to the pronounced tendency to speak of Smalltalk objects as if they are animated creatures, that do all sorts of knowing and wanting.
Not only is this categorical nonsense - unless computers are animated objects, which I don't believe - but it also adds an additional layer of metaphorical complication to understanding the code: One has not only to understand the code itself, but also to understand the metaphorical Newspeak that was popularized by Smalltalk-80 that is supposed to explain it. I want to avoid that animistic style of talking.
Fortunately, there are reasonably good texts explaining Smalltalk that do not also require the reader to learn a sort of animistic Newspeak in order to read the explanations of Squeak code. You find some ten books about Smalltalk here:
(http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html)
and from what's available I recommend 'The Art and Science of Smalltalk' by Simon Lewis and 'Inside Smalltalk' by Wilf Lalonde and John Pugh.