[ddfreyne]

The analogy given in the article is pretty accurate. The Smalltalk environment is unique in that it allows very easy access to the libraries, the IDE and the language’s internals (including the compiler!). The Smalltalk debuggers are among the best ones I have ever used.

(I’m mostly speaking out of my experience with VisualWorks, a commercial Smalltalk implementation, but other implementations are similar.)

I would greatly recommend everyone to give Smalltalk a try. The IDEs are pretty ugly and cumbersome, but don’t let that put you off. Get a feeling of the minimalism of the programming language and the pure form of object orientation. Dig through the code of the standard library — it’s quite easy — and check out the implementations of TrueClass, FalseClass, BlockClosure etc.

Unfortunately, many parts of the Smalltalk IDEs are horribly outdated and make Smalltalk a very poor choice of environment to use for production code.

Smalltalk lives in its own little world, and the tools that you’d normally use during day-to-day development are integrated in the IDE, and there is virtually no possibility of using external tools. The text editors are pretty bad, and you can’t use vim or emacs or Sublime Text. The Smalltalk VCSes are particularly horrible. For version control, you need to use systems such as Monticello or Store, both of which make me cringe just thinking about them again.

I also feel that Smalltalk coders get locked in into their environment. Many Smalltalkers that I have met are quite unfamiliar with what is happening in the outside world. Most of them have never heard of git, for example (and quite a few did not know what Subversion was). When an interesting technology enters the Smalltalk world, people seem to rush to reimplement it in Smalltalk (yes, there is STON — Smalltalk Object Notation).

These were the main reasons why I quit my Smalltalk job. A sad decision, but one that was unavoidable in the long run.

Smalltalk is a nice language and has IDEs with some very nice features that I would love to see in other environments, but it is also severely lagging behind in many other areas. I would like the Smalltalk community to be more aware of what is happening outside and build bridges. Without that mindset, I feel Smalltalk will simply fade out completely.

Source: I used to be a professional Smalltalker for almost three years.

[EdwardCoffin]

With respect to version control systems, I notice you didn't mention ENVY. I can't comment on Monticello nor Store, never having used them, but I still miss ENVY. Best version control system I ever used.

Source: professional Smalltalker for about four years (fifteen years ago)

[fractallyte]

> many parts of the Smalltalk IDEs are horribly outdated

My opinion is the opposite: I find the IDE in Pharo to be simple and very elegant, far more human-friendly than any I've seen in 'mainstream' languages. And this version of Smalltalk is under heavy development, with a push towards even greater cohesion. This small corner of computing is seething with hot, cutting-edge activity.

> The text editors are pretty bad

Well, you ought to know that Smalltalk is focused on relatively small snippets of code, held together in consistent OO structures. There's hardly any point in fancy text-editing features when your methods are generally 8-12 lines long!

[bromagosa]

> Well, you ought to know that Smalltalk is focused on relatively small snippets of code, held together in consistent OO structures. There's hardly any point in fancy text-editing features when your methods are generally 8-12 lines long!

This! And also, in Pharo 3.0 there's being a huge push towards better text editing, although I've never ever needed more than what Pharo 1.0 did already provide...

You don't work with text in Smalltalk.

[tikhonj]

Just because you have shorter methods does not mean you would not benefit from Emacs-like power. I use Haskell--which has even shorter functions, often half that length--and yet I still find Emacs exceptionally useful.

Any amount of text is still text, and Emacs excels at text editing.

[shurcooL]

I problem I ran into when giving it a try. I couldn't easily find a way to print to standard output. All I wanted was to print some strings, numbers and manipulate them. Instead, it was easier to have a red ball on the screen.

[klibertp]

There is no stdout, but if you want, you can print to something. Just open up a Transcript window and use 'Transcript show: ' method.