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What do you think is a good IDE for learning SmallTalk? I'll only be using it as a hobby, so it has to be free.

RichH
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Salsa
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10 Answers10

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You should also consider Pharo. Pharo is a fork of Squeak. Their goals are:

  • a clean and lean open-source Smalltalk platform, derived from Squeak

  • the obvious choice for professional Smalltalk development

  • an emerging platform to help people invent the future

Whether it is Squeak or Pharo, there is a large, active and supportive community.

Dale Henrichs
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    I second Pharo. Much more cleaner enviroment AND codebase than Squeak. – Ha-Duong Nguyen Aug 16 '11 at 16:59
  • How to install it? The ppa in http://pharo.org/download can't be found and I run the downloaded file just get the error *could not find display driver vm-display-X11* – Tony Jan 24 '15 at 02:26
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I think Squeak is the way to go. It has an entire smalltalk environment and is constantly updated. Its what I used for learning and is actually even a cool app in itself.

AdamC
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  • It is also opensource, free and has an excellent tutorial for getting started called squeak by example http://squeakbyexample.org/ – Demian Krige Sep 25 '08 at 17:56
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    I own this book and are consider it a bad one. Maybe you can explain what especiall you like about it. I just can day the whole morphic stuff is as bad explained as everywhere else. – Friedrich Sep 26 '08 at 15:05
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Squeak is free. Cincom has a non-commercial version of VisualWorks. GemStone/S is free for small installations. GNU Smalltalk is "free" in the GPL sense.

Randal Schwartz
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Definitively go for Squeak. It's a closed system in terms of the environment, or what you call the IDE, but it's fun to do webapps with - look for Seaside. However I always recommend everyone involved in development to take a look at it, just to understand how development in an image is working - and to experience a live system.

The main problem with Squeak, or maybe Smalltalk in general, is that once you get used to it, it's very hard to go back to the conventional way of programming.

Besides, I heard that you might become a better programmer if you work for some time in Smalltalk. I don't know if that's true, but I certainly like to think so.

Chris Schreiner
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Squeak is nice and free and very cool

Vinko Vrsalovic
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You can also use Cincom Smalltalk or Dolphin Smalltalk. They both have community editions.

jop
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If you start with Cincom Smalltalk, there's a ton of learning material available:

-- tutorials -- daily screencasts -- videos -- weekly podcast

You can find the screencasts, videos, and podcasts on iTunes - just search for "Smalltalk" in the podcast section.

jarober
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You won't need a separate IDE because smalltalks usually come with their own IDE, so choosing your smalltalk flavour pretty much determines the IDE for you. Don't let this fact scare you off from taking on smalltalk though!

WRT your original question, I had two wonderful years developing in Dolphin Smalltalk & highly recommend it.

Dolphin Smalltalk is only as free as a beer is though. If you need an opensource smalltalk go with Squeak.

In my opinion Dolphin is the more polished/comfortable/user-friendly one.

ˈoʊ sɪks
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    Of course Dolphin is Windows only while Squeak is cross platform. –  Mar 15 '09 at 20:47
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If you are used to Eclipse or Visual Studio, and are running on Windows - then Dolphin is something that will feel very familiar to you. It looks very nice (no emulated widgets, as its not trying to be cross platform), and it has nice touches like code completion and a graphical window designer (rather like IB on the mac). It also has great refactoring tools and can easily create small .exe file (e.g. 500k including the vm). There is a little screencast of doing TDD in Dolphin

Of course, these things are available in other dialects - in particular Squeak Pharo looks very promising particularly if you are after an open source product.

TimM
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Smalltalk/X came up on Reddit the other day. It looked pretty good.

Thomas Owens
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  • There is even more interesting Smalltalk-jv-branch - https://swing.fit.cvut.cz/projects/stx-jv/wiki – tukan Jul 16 '18 at 08:54