Both Lisp and Smalltalk are used by people who are working on
something important and new, with no time to waste. Either one is a
good choice for the work you wish to do.
I have used Lisp for about 10 years and Smalltalk for about 6. From
my point of view I would recommend Smalltalk to you. The critical
issue has nothing to do with technology or packages available for
download. Both languages have people much smarter than either of us
working very hard to develop good free downloads.
To me the key is which you think you can be comfortable with in time
to get your contract finished. It seems like you are thinking that
you find Smalltalk more comfortable, but hate to relinquish the
greater power of Lisp. Don't worry Smalltalk is plenty powerful
enough.
Smalltalk has an excellent book on style by Kent Beck called
"Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns." This little book has a wealth of
Smalltalk experience packed into it and is a good leg up. There are
similar books written for Lisp of course, but I find Beck's book easy
to understand and use.
Of greater concern to me is process. If you are new to programming
you might want to start out learning test driven development (TDD)
along with your new language. I think if you go over to
http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm you can have a look at what
unit testing frameworks are already available. I personally recommend
you create your own, but if you are just starting out that can be
difficult. Look at the examples and see which you understand the
best. A good unit testing framework that you can enhance yourself can
be a real time saver long term, assuming you embrace the idea of well
tested code.
Emacs is not something to fear. Just open it up and start typing.
Most Emacs you will find these days have a menu bar across the top.
Fear of Emacs is not a good reason to choose Smalltalk.
The good news is that it doesn't matter which language you choose
since you will have made a good choice.
Don Wells
www.extremeprogramming.org
On 20 Jan 2005 20:53:26 -0800, ·······@runbox.com wrote:
>I'm primarily interested in insights from people who have worked with
>both.
>
>I'm not a programmer, but wish to become one.
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:23:28 -0500, Don Wells wrote:
> Emacs is not something to fear. Just open it up and start typing. Most
> Emacs you will find these days have a menu bar across the top. Fear of
> Emacs is not a good reason to choose Smalltalk.
TeXmacs.
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:23:28 -0500, Don Wells wrote:
> Both Lisp and Smalltalk are used by people who are working on something
> important and new, with no time to waste. Either one is a good choice
> for the work you wish to do.
>
> <snip>
Hi,
you may be also interested in the Ruby language, which has features of
both lisp and smalltalk. It has the same Object-model as Smalltalk, but a
bit more convenient syntax (IMHO). Also it has several features of other
languages, like lambdas, everything is an expression (lisp), continuations
(scheme), regular expressions and convenient methods in the standard libs
(perl). As a whole, it is very well designed and brought together. I'd
say it is always useful to learn both lisp and smalltalk, but since you
explicitly said you weren't interested in that, I'd give Ruby a go.
Some pointers:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
and of course the newsgroup.
Kristof