This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: On Learning Smalltalk Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I notice that Giulio Piancastelli was trying to learn Smalltalk, but gave up - he tried to do this in a workspace:

foo: n
  |s|
  s := n.
  ^[:i | s := s+i.]

He ran into trouble getting a "Nothing more expected" error from the system (Squeak, in this case). Now, for those of us who are Smalltalkers, this is clear - you don't write methods in a workspace, you write them in a browser, in a class. Here, he's trying to write a method in a workspace. Like I said, clear to us Smalltalkers - obviously not clear to a neophyte.

This is an expectations issue. People expect to write code and then compile it "en masse" - which just isn't what you do in Smalltalk. You can write the kind of code he wanted to write in a workspace, but not as a method - a method is typically attached to a class. You can script in a workspace, but you just omit the method entry point. That's what threw Giulio; he didn't realize that he was supposed to create a class, add a method, and then write some script to drive it in a workspace. Probably a better book would have helped - certainly for VisualWorks, a walk through the examples workspace would have helped (as well as a look at the tutorials).

However, that's obviously not enough - VW has tutorials and the examples workspace - what should we be doing that we aren't? I'd like to be able to help people like Giulio not get discouraged.