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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Why Smalltalk?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
There is no main. Rather than writing programs, you construct objects. Rather than running programs, you test objects. A Smalltalk environment will have several browsers up at a time. Some for browsing, others for editing. Another typical scenario is to have several *workspaces* up at the same time. A little code here, a few tests there.
I think Patrick's right - not having main() is a large part of the productivity question. Ironically, it's also one of the things that make Smalltalk hard to introduce to people - a common complaint from experienced developers, after their first encounter with Smalltalk is Where's my program? Once you get beyond that - and realize that you are holding clay - clay that you can mold into any shape you want - is when you really start to become productive.