Starting with Squeak
Squeak is a beautiful and amazing
free programming environment that exists since
1996. It is created and developed by the original creators and developers of
Smalltalk. I discovered it on July 7, 2001.
It is special in many ways:
Squeak is a programming environment and a
programming language bundled together.
It is different from anything you know - even if you think you know it. You can
program with it. You can
draw with it. You can write with it. You can
make music with it. You can
do mathematics with it. You can
make presentations with it. You
can play games with it. You can
browse the internet with it,
e-mail with
it, chat with it, and generally communicate with it through your computer. You
can do anything with and in it a computer can do, display, express, or help to
present or understand, including your own new ideas.
In short: It is a universal environment for doing art, science, programming and
having fun using computers creatively. It is
total computing.
What's more:
Squeak is
free. Squeak is written in itself. You get
the full source code for
everything you can do with Squeak included with Squeak, written in Squeak, and
for you to play with, use, learn, and change as you see fit - which itself is
pretty unique: Nothing is hidden or kept secret for you in Squeak, and
everything is free and open
source:
In Squeak, everything you do with it and everything it displays comes with its
own free open source-code, that enables you to understand and change everything
about it. In simple intuitive terms, "free" means "without payment"; "code" is
"the textual form of programs that may be run on a computer"; and "open source"
means that "you get the code for the programs you run with the programs you run"
(so that you can see and come to understand why the programs do run as they do,
for this depends on their coding).
Also, Squeak is rapidly being developed by some 25 - 100 people working in their
own time without payment, and is very much at the frontier of programming.
In any case, whether you are new to programming or quite experienced: Try out
Squeak and see how its environment, language and approach differ from e.g. Java,
C++ or C#.
It is true, though, that Squeak is especially for intelligent people who like
their programming to be fun, and is therefore a minority effort: If you like
unreadable code or a programming language that is boring, ugly and mainly useful
for making money commercially, Squeak is NOT for you.
If you are intelligent and curious, and not afraid to dedicate some effort to
learning a new language and environment, you may find you will be much
enlightened and enjoyed by Squeak.
I wish you pleasurable and instructive reading and computing!
Maarten Maartensz
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