Would you start learning Smalltalk?
My questions is simple!
- Would you start learning Smalltalk if you had the time? Why? Why not?
- Do you already know Smalltalk? Why would you recommend Smalltalk? Why not?
Personally I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer and I really like it. However, I'm thinking about Smalltalk because I read various blogs and some people are calling Ruby something like "Smalltalk Light". The second reason why I'm interested in Smalltalk is Seaside.
Maybe someone has made the same transition before?
EDIT: Actually, what got me most excited about Smalltalk/Seaside is the following Episode of WebDevRadio: Episode 52: Randal Schwartz on Seaside (among other things)
Answer
If you like Ruby you'll probably like Smalltalk. IIRC Seaside has been ported to the Gemstone VM, which is part of their Gemstone/S OODBMS. This has much better thread support than Ruby, so it is a better back-end for a high-volume system. This might be a good reason to take a close look at it.
Reasons to learn Smalltalk:
It's a really, really nice programming environment. Once you've got your head around it (it tends to be a bit of a culture shock for people used to C++ or Java) you'll find it to be a really good environment to work in. Even a really crappy smalltalk like the Old Digitalk ones I used is a remarkably pleasant system to use. Many of the old XP and O-O guru types like Kent Beck and Martin Fowler cut their teeth on Smalltalk back in the day and can occasionally be heard yearning for the good old days in public (Thanks to Frank Shearer for the citation, +1) - Agile development originated on this platform.
It's one of the most productive development platforms in history.
Several mature implementations exist and there's a surprisingly large code base out there. At one point it got quite trendy in financial market circles where developer productivity and time-to-market is quite a big deal. Up until the mid 1990s it was more or less the only game in town (With the possible exception of LISP) if you wanted a commercially supported high-level language that was suitable for application development.
Deployment is easy - just drop the image file in the appropriate directory.
Not really a reason, but the Gang of Four Book uses Smalltalk for quite a few of their examples.
Reasons not to learn Smalltalk:
It's something of a niche market. You may have trouble finding work. However if you are producing some sort of .com application where you own the servers this might not be an issue.
It's viewed as a legacy system by many. There is relatively little new development on the platform (although Seaside seems to be driving a bit of a renaissance).
It tends not to play nicely with traditional source control systems (at least as of the early-mid 90's when I used it). This may or may not still be the case.
It is somewhat insular and likes to play by itself. Python or Ruby are built for integration from the ground up and tend to be more promiscuous and thus easier to integrate with 3rd party software. However, various other more mainstream systems suffer from this type of insularity to a greater or lesser degree and that doesn't seem to impede their usage much.