Sunday, July 01, 2007

Learning Smalltalk

I am doing my Object Oriented Programming and Design course this summer and our prof Ralph Johnson is teaching us OOPD using Smalltalk. I am thrilled to learn smalltalk. I was and am shocked to see so many Java concepts being derived out of smalltalk. I always admired the concept of VM and thought that Java was the first Language to have a VM but squeak (the flavor of smalltalk we use) uses VM and it is more than 30 years old. List of functionalities that seems (for me) to have been ported into Java from Smalltalk
1. VM
2. Collection utils and Collection hierarchy
3. Concept of "Object" class. In smalltalk, Object is the top level class out of which every class originates.
4. Equals and Hash functionality
5. The concept of workspace which is being used in famous IDE's like Eclipse.

I'll probably add to this list if I recollect.

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