On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 01:53:09PM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > Chad Perrin wrote: > >Why? Why not just remember that it's a separate language? I've > >experienced a little negative transferrence of knowledge between Ruby > >and Perl because of their similarities, but once I got past that minor > >hurdle my growing knowledge in each language has only helped with my > >ability to learn more about the other. If you aren't doing the same, > >you're doing something wrong. > > > I learn for two reasons ... either because I need to or because I want > to. I needed to learn FORTRAN because management thought macro assembly > was unmaintainable. I needed to learn Perl, because my "awk" scripts had > become unmanageable and my boss said, "Perl's the best language for that > sort of thing now." Which it was. I *wanted* to learn Lisp, Forth, R, > and Ruby. I don't *want* to become a better Perl programmer. I just want > to be "good enough" at it. What does that have to do with "unlearning" Perl? > >Yeah, you can still run Java on a Mac. Of course, for the purposes you > >describe, I suspect Smalltalk would have been a better choice for those > >applications in most cases. Smalltalk is underrated and marginalized to > >the point that almost nobody thinks of it when choosing a language for a > >project, though, unfortunately. > > > Smalltalk is a member of my list of the half dozen pivotal programming > languages. The other five are macro assembler, Fortran, Lisp, APL and > Forth, Smalltalk was/is truly a marvelous environment. But when these > applications were designed, I don't think anyone was giving away a run > time/compiler/interperter/environment for Smalltalk. > > I did try Squeak at one point. I found the GUI so counterintuitive after > years of Windows and Linux desktop usage that I gave up on it. After I > build a couple of projects in Ruby, I might go back to Squeak. Is there > another freely-available Smalltalk implementation? I think there are a couple others. I haven't much looked into it beyond Squeak, I'm afraid. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.