| I need to caution against using a Smalltalk dialect like Pharo to teach OOP. The essential problem is that Smalltalk does OOP "right" and what one sees called OOP in the broader community generally does not have that same ideological purity. In addition Smalltalks are a deeply different vision of programming. I don't think I've ever shown a programmer a Smalltalk and had them go "Oh yeah this all makes sense." I have to preface it... "This is a different vision of programming than you are used to, go ahead and run the executable." "Um, it opened a desktop?" "Yeah. So this is the program you are writing." "What is?" "This blank canvas." "Oh, this is a text editor?" "No, like, the program is running live right now." "Well can I shut it down and edit it?" "You edit it while it's still running. Here, go ahead and right click something..." There's invariably some form of disbelief: surely we wouldn't have made this whole programming thing hard for no reason, so surely this approach to "everything is alive and you are mutating the ecosystem" is impossible for the simple reason that it is not ubiquitous. |