Can anyone provide a suggestion on what to use to learn Smalltalk under Windows? The article mentions both Squeak and Pharo, of which only I've used Squeak briefly in college, but there I really had a hard time with the interface. At least I felt like I completely hosed my Smalltalk VM more than once. I have not tried Pharo. It appears that there is also Dolphin Smalltalk.
I've used Squeak briefly in college, but there I really had a hard time with the interface.
Well, they have a "burn the diskpacks" philosophy, so the interface is very different and changes a lot of conventions.
At least I felt like I completely hosed my Smalltalk VM more than once.
This is something very different and weird you'd have to get used to. Hosing your VM is actually no big deal. There's a way to recover from that quickly without losing any source code changes. I would try Pharo. Dolphin was a nice environment, but that was so long ago.
(Since Smalltalk gives you the power to do anything, even with your meta-level, it >has< to work like this. Otherwise, people would feel timid about manipulating their meta-level.)
At this point, I'd say Pharo is the most actively developed, and the most polished, of the open source Smalltalk implementations. There's been a fair amount of work cleaning up the UI since they forked from Squeak, and the free ebook "Pharo By Example" has a good overview of the UI and development tools in the opening chapter.
Squeak, Pharo, VisualWorks and Dolphin will all work fine on Windows.
Squeak and Pharo (and VisualWorks to a lesser degree) have non-standard UIs that will be (a little) unfamiliar to Windows users. Dolphin's UI should be the most familiar.
Thanks!