Smalltalk Isn’t Dead, it’s Just Waiting in Deep Thought
How writing a book made me open a few of my favorite Smalltalk books
It’s hard to imagine what my career would have been like without the great fortune of having learned and programmed professionally in the Smalltalk programming language. This amazing programming language continues to inspire and teach me important lessons, decades after I used it professionally.
In the first book I have written, “Eclipse Collections Categorically: Level up your programming game”, Appendix C is dedicated to Smalltalk. You can find some simple Smalltalk code examples in the appendix and elsewhere in the book. I also include three Smalltalk books as sources in the references section that helped me learn valuable lessons in the formative years of my career in the late 1990s. These books have been invaluable in helping me solve problems for the past thirty years.
The three Smalltalk books referenced in the book are underlined in red below, and are in the image above.
I know that Smalltalk is not done teaching me lessons. I just have to go back to the “Deep Thought” language and books and ask the right questions. I learned one lesson tonight, from “Smalltalk-80: The Language.” The answer to the ultimate question of the organization of chapters 3–10 in my new book is described on page 42. I found the answer tonight as I was writing this post. The question is, of course, “What is on page 42?” I had to write the entire book and publish it to find out the question I didn’t realize I should have been looking for in the book, that I had cited for another purpose. 🤦♂️
Hopefully you’re more curious than confused. If you get the HGTTG reference above, hopefully you chuckled, and didn’t spit out your coffee or tea. The section on page 42 is titled “Message Categories.” That’s all I will say. If you’ve programmed in Smalltalk, you’ll know what these are. If you haven’t, then I explain an equivalent idea for Java in my book. I also talk about them in several other blogs I have written over the last six months (if you’re looking for free). I don’t refer to the idea as “Message Categories” in the book or blogs, as message is a real thing in Smalltalk, that is not available in Java (at least in the same way). In my book and the blogs, I refer to the concept as “Method Categories.” The difference between Message and Method is another thing worth researching and learning from Smalltalk.
Anyway, there are some other great books and articles that have influenced me in my programming career and in the writing of my book and many of my blogs. You can see some of these books referenced above. Even if you aren’t interested in reading my book, I would highly recommend checking out some of the amazing books and authors above. If you’re programming in any language with a unit testing framework influenced by or named JUnit, and you haven’t read Kent Beck’s article in “Guide to Better Smalltalk: A Sorted Collection” starting on p. 277, then you’re possibly one level removed from the original source of inspiration and influence for JUnit.
I love learning new things about computers and our somewhat short history. There are some great books and authors out there. I love buying classic computer books when I discover them.
Thank you for reading! Keep on reading, especially books written by human authors!
- A link for anyone still confused by the HGTTG reference. I highly recommend reading the HGTTG series if you haven’t. It is a super fun and wonderful series. You can find out where the name “Deep Thought” comes from at the link as well.
I am the creator of and committer for the Eclipse Collections OSS project, which is managed at the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse Collections is open for contributions. I am also the author of the book, Eclipse Collections Categorically: Level up your programming game.
