I am a c# developer and most of my friends are much smarter than me, and they laugh at me and start to swear at me in smalltalk. I want to learn this so that I might better be insulted at their insults... and maybe learn a thing or two in the process.
So, what is the best place to start with regard to smalltalk in a windows environment?
The best current free Smalltalk is probably Squeak. This currently out-performs its near relative Pharo, at least on my ancient box, but you should really take a look at both of them.
The big problem with Smalltalk is that there are no really high-quality text books. There's a list of free ones here, but I couldn't recommend any of them strongly. If you decide to use Squeak, take a look at Squeak By Example, which isn't too bad.
Since you are on Windows, I will say you should try DCE (Dolphin Community Edition), It has every thing (Including better integration with the OS than Pharo or Squeak, especially the GUI).
The Professional Edition will take you one level up since it contains other extra get-in-the-flow tools plus the Delivery wizard to directly produce executables (in short EXEs). It's more than enough for learning Smalltalk. It includes a Help file (containing fast intro to Smalltalk, a comprehensive coverage of the environment, pattern usage, and a nice gui example).
If you think you will stay for long on Windows (an environment issue, etc...) or as igouy said 'leverage your Windows experience', then by All means check DCE.
As an extra I suggest you download it, check the intro to Smalltalk in the Help file and later on enjoy these videos:
- A Better Hello World
- Fun with MS Speech library (ActiveX wizard sample tutorial)
- Interfacing with iTunes
- Programming Animation with Dolphin (this shows the interactive nature of Smalltalk in general, still in Dolphin is integrated with Windows so you can play with Windows's windows and controls in an easy and thrilling way.)
and by the way it's addictive!
happy small talks with Dolphin Smalltalk ;)
Whichever environment you pick to start playing with, don't forget to check out Stéphane Ducasse's collection of FREE (and LEGAL) Smalltalk books: Free Smalltalk Books
There is a nice new website called The World of Smalltalk http://www.world.st, where you can find a simple yet comprehensible entry to the Smalltalk world, from introduction and documentation to the blogs, mailing lists, dialects and frameworks.
On Windows there are Win-only Dolphin Smalltalk, free cross-platform Squeak and Pharo, and commercial VisualWorks.
Good luck!
Squeak, like Neil Butterworth said, and hang out on squeak-dev. The beginners mailing list's a good place to ask questions.
So, what is the best place to start with regard to smalltalk in a windows environment?
Perhaps it would be best to leverage your familiarity with MS Windows - "Dolphin Smalltalk X6 is an object-oriented development environment for Microsoft Windows™."
Try the "free for personal/educational use" "Community Edition" of Dolphin Smalltalk.
Dolphin Smalltalk Pro is selling for USD 225. Where can I such a powerful, good that price.
My preferences are Smalltalk and Common Lisp, but the Common Lisp IDEs are expensive by comparison.
The only problem is, I'd have to use Windows, but that was a decision I already had made, after years of Linux (going nowhere in the application-selling domain).
To get started, I would recommend a seaside one-click image. Seaside is a most interesting web-framework and the image is based on Pharo. There are a number of screencasts available. The authors of SQB expanded the book and adapted it to Pharo at Pharo-By-Example. They have a high-volume development mailing list and a users list. For seaside you'd want the users list. Seaside also has a book and the tutorials by James Foster which I'd recommend you to look first at.
I do not find significant speed differences between Pharo and Squeak, but Pharo is much cleaner due to its developer focus. Squeak contains a lot more interesting tidbits.
If you find the one-click image (there is also one available in a Squeak version) not fast enough, the introduction of the cog vm will improve performance by a factor two or so.
On Windows you should make sure that your anti-virus software does not try to verify the changes file each time it is written, or your Smalltalk environment gets to be very slow.
For learning a lot (not recommended to start with) you should take a look at the Moose one-click image and the book by Doru.
As Janko said, Pharo and Squeak are good Smalltalk implementations to start with, but I would also like to add Cincom's WebVelocity which is a bit different. It is a VisualWorks/Seaside based Smalltalk IDE in the browser.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3448383/best-way-to-start-with-smalltalk-in-a-windows-environment-win-7