Help - The Squeak Environment - 3. What is Squeak?

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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:

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).

We will have to say considerably more about programming languages, programming environments, programming, open source code, and the great and amazing virtue of a programming environment being written in it's own programming language that's free, but at this point we hold fast to one thing only:

The name "Squeak" refers to two things

The Squeak Environment, briefly SqE.
The Squeak Language, briefly SqL.

These are complementary but different things, and the former is easier to learn than the latter. In general intuitive terms, the programming nvironment is what you see and work with when you're running Squeak, and the programming language is what makes the environment work (when programs in it are run in the environment).

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