Welcome to my Squeak pages!
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.
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, write e-mails 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.
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).
I discovered it on July 7, 2001 and decided I like it so
much I give it its own directory on my site and to write about it, also
because Squeak so far is low on good documentation.
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!
Update December 28 2004:
There is now a first version of Squeak Help. It starts here:
You can read it on this site, and if you have a Squeak you can download a
zip version:
There is since December 2004 a fine mirror of the material in Squeak Help
engineered by Simon Michael, which is here
Finally for a very useful link with much more documentation in pdf
form: