Still Looking for the Swan in Squeak's Ugly Duckling

http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8158

So this is not exactly the tutorial I was expecting. But it's also quite possible my expectations were a little skewed.

Unfortunately Avi Bryant wasn't able to make the conference so Randal Schwartz stepped in. And no disrespect to Randal but if I had known this substitution had occurred, I would have picked a different tutorial simply because I had seen his presentation last year and was interested in a different perspective.

Partly I feel like I was expecting too much from this tutorial and part of me feels like I got something different than described.

When I read the description in the link above I don't get the sense of a remedial no-background talk. But like I said Randal took this over at the last minute for Avi so I have no complaints with him.

I think I focused a little too much on the last paragraph of the description whereas I should realize that that is what usually gets covered least at the end (or not at all):

"But we’ll also address the practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak: how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it; how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others; how to find documentation and examples; how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries; how to manage deployment."

I am relatively comfortable with the ideas of smalltalk and reading it's code, just not completely sold on the language and environment. So what I was mostly looking for was the addressing of "practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak":

• how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it;
  
  • just a mention that this is possible. I would have really liked a detailed course on how to customize the ugly duckling away
  
  
• how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others;
  
  • there was a pretty good description of version control and options for doing this
  
  
• how to find documentation and examples;
  
  • this was well done and is a core part of the wonder of smalltalk
  
  
• how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries;
  
  • I don't think there was any mention of this (unless I really zoned out)
  
  
• how to manage deployment.
  
  • I don't recall anything like this
  
  

But really it was a well done tutorial, just not what I was expecting. But I think
this was just a combination of over ambitious expectations and last minute teacher changes.

Here is the smalltalk course I would love to have:

• develop a real world useful app while I watch. e.g. take some unix sysadmin tasks and automate them and create a reporting system etc. ie, show me that squeak can kick python's ass at something where python excels
  
• show me how to recover when my image crashes or I've accidentally broken things
  
• show me how to customize my way from the default image to one of the premade developer images. then explain to me why these aren't already the defaults
  
• show me how to convince my bosses that I should do a trial project in smalltalk. :)
  

One New Language a Year: (was) Smalltalk

OK, so I had this crazy plan of doing the "one new language a year" thing. I really like the idea of this. Get out of your comfort zone, prevent settling for a "blub" language, learn new techniques. So I choose smalltalk and thought this would fit the bill. I was really excited to work with turtles all the way down. "Real" object oriented programming. Etc.

And here it is May and I'm just not doing so well. Best laid schemes and all that. In fact I've decided to abandon it for, get this, emacslisp. Only time will tell if this was a good decision or just my normal fickleness.

Part of this decision is just pure pragmatism. My learning windows for this plan are of necessity going to be early in the morning before breakfast or late at night after the family's in bed. I've tried both slots for a month or more and both put me to sleep. You can't learn much while you are asleep so no matter the plan/desire I have to be doing something that engages my attention.

OK, I said it. Smalltalk puts me to sleep. And I feel bad for saying it. I really want to be the guy who likes smalltalk and wields it with authority. But there is just so much I don't enjoy about it and while I'm sure there are some cool things to learn from it, it just doesn't entice me. At least not at 6 am. We'll see if emacslisp can do better.

Smalltalk is like this quirky, fairly attractive girl who on paper seems like a good match for you ("Wow, you like continuations? Me too!") but for whatever reason just doesn't ignite that spark. In addition, she has lots of eccentricities that if she was "the one" would be charming/braggable. But if you are indifferent to her they just come off as irritations/oddities.

I also wonder if watching this video put the final nail in the coffin: "what killed smalltalk" (also). Just hearing about smalltalk being dead (I'm not defending this thesis) sort of activated my pragmatism module which some how grabbed the reins of my brain and executed veto power.

The thing that bugs me is that I don't see myself as a practical dude. In fact, I find the thought of being practical a little bit horrifying. I'm always doing things just because they are interesting, not because I'm trying to be more efficient, etc. And here I am making a practical decision. Ugg.

I wonder what the rules are about abandoning your "one new language a year" language halfway through the year. Is there some governing body I should contact? Do I need to ask permission first?

For what it's worth, smalltalk is not permanently abandoned; it is just pushed down on the list. If I stick with the language a year program I will almost certainly head back to smalltalk at some point. We'll see what happens next time around.

Does working with python as your primary language makes it harder to learn new languages? Every language that I've learned so far has been a productivity boost or has some other sweetener (my language history: basic -> pascal -> c -> c++ -> java -> perl -> python). emacslisp is a booster just because it is the only option in emacs (I will be looking into pymacs though). haskell looks like it might be a next step in the awesomeness hierarchy. But smalltalk doesn't *seem* (in my limited experience) like a significantly more productive tool past python. smalltalk feels like a language from which many great ideas have been lifted. And the ones that haven't yet are either in the process of being stolen (pypy - turtles all the way down) or aren't worth the trouble (image files, etc).

What's funny is that I've talked to others who have had the same initial fascination with smalltalk and then given up on it due various pain points or lack or practicality.

I guess in the end part of it is that smalltalk doesn't seem to solve a problem that I'm having in a vastly superior way and (surprisingly to me) isn't more fun. On paper it seems it should be. And I actually feel guilty for not liking smalltalk. I've failed the gods of language geekdom.

Any way, on to the new hotness of, er, emacslisp.

So why emacslisp? At the start of the year I was trying to decide between smalltalk and haskell. I was in sort of an object-y mood at the time so smalltalk won out. I'm not defaulting to haskell at this time primarily because I want to give it the full year (and it just feels like it has to be a calendar year starting in January). emacslisp works because I know it will be useful. It will make a real difference to my productivity immediately (I mostly live in emacs) and I like lispy languages (though I've only dabbled and/or used them for a semester in an ai class). *And* I don't feel too bad about giving it only half a year.

My goal with emasclisp is to get to the point where I can program in it as easily as I think (how it is for python with me now). I want to be able to whip out useful helper functions like this and be able to write my own modes and/or hack on existing emacs packages.

Any way, smalltalk, it's not you it's me. When I get my head right maybe we'll meet again and give it another shot. I wish you all the best. (but please don't call - I'm not sure emacslisp would understand us "just being friends").

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.

Smalltalk for a Year - Status Report 1

As I've mentioned, I'm working on smalltalk as my learn a language a year language. So where am I after a month?

My initial idea was to ease into things using etoys as a gateway drug. But after a week or so I decided that, while it's oddly fascinating and kinda fun, it's not really smalltalk per se. So while I'll probably dabble a little bit, I've decided that I need to work with more mainstream smalltalk learning.

In that vein, I'm reading Squeak By Example and am about 1/3 of the way through. It's a very nice no nonsense introduction to smalltalk the language and squeak the environment.

After that I'm thinking I'll either look at the Squeak Development Example for Squeak 3.9 tutorial or work on a Seaside Tutorial. I'm sort of leaning towards the latter, but I'm sure I'll eventually do both, but for some reason I'm more drawn to the web development aspect of things these days. And how cool are you if you use continuations? (Pretty cool, I'd wager)

I have to confess that already in the first month I've had to fight off the the urge just to ditch this project. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I'm not immediately overwhelmed with a love for smalltalk. And logically that's not really so unexpected. Learning a language is *hard*. And in the initial phases you basically see everything with your blub colored glasses and in the new language you see blub features but they are distorted and some blub features are completely missing or almost too awkward to be usable. You may dimly see some features that are interesting but they are obscured by an alien syntax and semantics.

And that's where I am now with smalltalk. There are somethings that seem interesting (elegant metaclass programming features, turtles all the way down, highly integrated development environment, etc) but I've never used these features "in anger". So at best they just seem kinda interesting. On the other hand the lack of modules feels archaic, the default user interface look-and-feel seems oddly clunky, the lack of list access syntax (e.g. foo[3:5]) makes me sad, and I miss emacs.

So I'm in the no man's land right now. I see things faintly off in the distance that seem interesting but everything in my reach is (seemingly) inferior and awkward.

I guess it helps me to lay it out like this. I'm surprised (even though I should know myself better by now) at how easily I could just abandon things and jump over to haskell for a while. Oooh, and then lisp is kinda cool, and then, oh yeah, I heard javascript is the NBL, I better look at that for a few minutes today.

I wonder if it's harder to fall in love with another language when your day job is python. But I'm a little afraid that python has become my blub and I must fight the tendencies of a blub programmer to be blind to non-blubby goodness.

Ok, enough dithering. I'm putting my blinders on again and focusing on smalltalk. I actually hope (and somewhat expect) that I will get over the oddness hurdle and really love smalltalk.

But it's not love at first sight. It's more like cautious optimism at first sight.

One New Language a Year: Smalltalk

The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning a new programming language every year. I thought for a long time that this was a good idea, but didn't really act on it. Instead I'd dabble in a dozen languages a year. While this has built my intuition as to what various languages are like it has not made me a competent programmer in a new language. So for this year I'm going to actually pick a language, make a learning schedule and keep on it for the entire year. Now I almost certainly won't be able to stop myself from messing around with other languages to some extent (e.g. I'm slowly working through the Real World Haskell book), but my goal is to direct more of my focus and energy on a smaller target and hopefully get to the point where I really have an additional tool to use for solving real problems.

So then comes the question of which language to learn. In one sense I should probably pick a language that I don't know at all. The problem is that I've played with a lot of languages over the years. I don't think there are a lot of programming concepts/paradigms that I'm not at least familiar with. But there are a lot that I have not mastered. So I will just pick from the list of languages of which I'm not a master. A very healthy list.

Here is a short list of languages that I at least briefly considered:

• smalltalk
  
• haskell
  
• something lispy (common lisp, scheme, emacslisp)
  
• clojure (also lispy, but new and different)
  
• erlang
  
• mozart/oz
  
• ruby
  
• perl 6
  
• javascript
  

All the languages above have some intriguing features but in the end I chose smalltalk (specifically squeak, but perhaps soon pharo). The deciding factors were:

• My kids are getting close to an age where I might introduce them to programming so I'd like to have some mastery of a kid friendly programming language. While I think python fits that requirement pretty well, etoys seems like it might fit it even better (scratch also looks interesting).
  
• I want to bump up my familiarity with deeper OO programming practices. In particular, I want to bump up my mastery of design patterns. Smalltalk is one of the languages where design patterns were first developed
  
• I want to have a language where I can return to one of my first loves: graphical simulations. I could clearly do that in python, but well, learning a new language is always a good excuse to play around with graphics libraries.
  
• I want to work on something that is really different in a fundamental way. Being forced to use the squeak development environment (instead of emacs) and an "image" instead of text files fits the bill
  
• seaside just seems inherently cool and I'd like to get my mind around continuations.
  

I imagine my plan will change as I learn more and follow my interests, but as a first pass:

• Learn etoys
  

  This will give me a chance to start off sort of easy and genuinely playful. I've been collecting some links and project ideas but initially I am planning on looking at: Powerful Ideas in the Classroom, Idioms for Composing Games with Etoys, Etoys chapter in Learn Programming With Robots, and poke around in the squeakland site.
  

• Intro to smalltalk/squeak reading/tutorials.
  

  Some items that stand out as worth perusing include: Laser Game Tutorial, Squeak By Example, Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion (I've had this on the shelf for a while and it's really time I read it), Mark Guzdial's "Blue" book, and browse around on this list of smalltalk books.
  

• Get familiar with seaside
  

  In particular I will work on porting over a Django app (which used to be a quixote app) to seaside. I'm not planning on migrating it to seaside for real, but it's nice to have a real world project with lots of ugly edge cases in mind to see how a framework really works.
  

• Depend on smalltalk
  

  By the end of the year I hope to have some project that I maintain (even if just for myself) that keeps me involved with writing and maintaining smalltalk code.
  

Note: Haskell came in a very close second. It was actually a very hard decision. It seems like Haskell is poised to take off and it would be nice to be part of that wave. On the other hand. I already know that that language is pretty challenging to make progress on and will still be waiting for me next year.

FWIW: I recently came across this list of languages worth learning.