Smalltalk for a Year - Status Report 2

So my goal was to do monthly updates on my smalltalk progress during this year. For January I was going strong. Learning my way around, getting comfortable with syntax deciding what would be the best way to spend my energies, getting over the newness/alien-ness.

And then sometime in February I started losing momentum. And then into March a complete and utter stop. I even forgot I had this goal of learning smalltalk. So March became the month of figuring out why things had gone so badly and trying to pick myself up again.

There were a combination of factors that contributed to my akrasia (hey, it's a word!). Partly this was due to me being a little under the weather and trying to be the kind of person who actually listens to their body and goes to sleep when they are tired. In the middle of this I got bogged down in a seaside tutorial. At some point the code I typed in to follow along with the example wasn't working the way it should. I kept debugging this and that but looking at the same problem day after day when you are tired and new to a language is a bit of a lethal combination.

And then at some point hibernate on my window's laptop came up as a blue screen of death and I forgot to reopen the tutorial and my squeak image to remind me to take a look. At this point my amnesia was pretty much total.

Another thing I realized is that learning smalltalk *and* a web framework at the same time is a lot to take in. Especially if you don't really believe that you are going to use the web framework day to day.

I'm actually really interested in seaside. It seems fascinating. I'm a little distressed that I've developed a streak of practicality that makes it hard to focus on things that aren't directly useful to me. That's just not the geek way.

In any case March was the month of getting back on the horse. So here is my plan now. There are four things I'm going to work on in one order or another that I believe will be able to keep my attention.

• convert Collective Intelligence code to smalltalk. I've already read this through once and did all the examples in python. i find that converting examples to a new language really makes it hard to skip over parts that you don't really understand.
  
• read Functional Pattern System for Object-Oriented Design and implement in smalltalk. I've been really interested in the streams data model and how it solves the hamming problem. I've been surprised not to see an easily found solution in smalltalk. i'm hoping to be able to develop a solution by reading this book.
  
• investigate SPY. I'm keenly interested in pypy and virtual machines. also i never really seem to make progress on learning a language until i start peeling back the curtains to see how things work under the covers
  
• read thru squeak soup code. I really like using the python version of this and this is a sort of problem I'm interested in and feel it would be useful to understand how it is solved.
  

One other thing. I'm purposely changing my learning slot from evening to morning. I've traditionally been more likely to keep promises to myself in the morning than the evening.

OK, let's get that momentum going again.