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2. Squeak involves an
open source programming language
That Squeak involves an
open source programming language is a direct consequence of the previous point. It means that the actual
environment one works in is extra-ordinarily powerful: Of everything running in
Squeak you have the full source code as well, so that you can alter anything
according to your understanding - and you can do so while remaining in the same
environment in which the code is running.
Programming languages are intrinsically difficult - for they must mediate
between the natural language of human users of computers, in a formalism that is
simple enough to be processed by a computing machine, yet similar enough to a
human language to be used and read and indeed programmed by human users. Also,
the language of Squeak is different from other programming languages and is used
in a different - and unique - kind of programming environment, which is the
Squeak you use an work with.
What I called "Squeak" in fact comes (on Windows at least) as a
squeak.exe plus four associated files:
an image file with a changes file, and a sources file. Squeak.exe runs a
Virtual
Machine that loads an image from a diskdrive of a computer which for the user of
the computer gets somehow displayed in the
Squeak Environment which is written
in the Squeak Language that the Virtual Machine can process to produce new or
different things running in the environment.