Years ago I lived in a Smalltalk world and never knew how good I had it.  As Larry O’Brien says, “Smalltalk has enough proponents so you're probably at least aware that it's browser and persistent workspace are life-altering (if you aren't, check out James Robertson's series of screencasts).

Unfortunately, in the Great White North, not too many Smalltalk jobs were available and in fact it really boiled down to programming Windows or Unix.  And somehow I found myself in the Windows world using Visual Studio and Visual Basic.  In some respects, VB was almost Smalltalk like – I loved the interpreter of stepping through code, finding a mistake, fixing it on the spot, setting next statement to run a few lines back and stepping through and keep on going.  I found myself enjoying the rhythm of it and how productive I was.  That was the thrill for me.

Then came C# which is a statically typed language, but what really got me was the rote of write code, compile it, fix compile errors, then compile it again, fix runtime errors, compile it again, step through, note the error, stop debugging, edit code, compile it again, etc.  As you can imagine from the VB world, the most common error I got was, “are you missing a cast?”  Also, my productivity just was nowhere near as fast.

A year or so ago, I came across IronPython.  What I loved immediately was the interactive console that interpreted code on the fly.  I type in my line of code and execute it with immediate results.  For me, I work best like this.  It allows me to experiment with CLR types and once I have it figured, I can then cut n paste into a code file and build up my application.

What is really exciting to me is that the DLR is intended to support a variety of dynamic languages, such as IronRuby by John Lam and others… yes, even Smalltalk.  Way to go Peter Fisk!