When I was taking a look at Ruby to learn what is it like, I faced a concept called "block". But I never got it bacause you could do everything with a block, also with traditional methods you learned so far. So I asked myself, why would a human being invent something like block? Maybe this is because of the people who tries to explain the blocks or because of my low IQ but this was the case for me when learning Ruby.

I met Io programming language a few weeks ago. It is very simplistic, minimalist and has a consistent syntax. It is a fully object oriented language inspired by Smalltalk. A significant difference from Smalltalk is that it is prototype based, so there are no classes.

To name a few advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

• Very consistent syntax
• Very minimalistic rules
• Has a lot of useful methods that makes your life easier
• Very polished source code
• Very informative and polished errors
• Chic documentation

Disadvantages:

• I like the writing style:

Part I of Blue Book is almost complete, actually I read it but didn't understand the metaclass concept, so I will read last chapter again. Then I am thinking of going through the GNU Smalltalk tutorial so that I can learn the differences between Smalltalk-80 and GNU Smalltalk syntax. Part II is the longest part of the book but once complete I will be able to do practical programming with GNU Smalltalk.

Hello,

I guess the mailing list issue I have is something related with my university internet. So, I haven't solved it yet. Let's continue to make suggestions from here.

One of the other things that experienced users who come across with a new language looking for is a comparsion table of that language with other languages or a simple table that lists whether the language includes some common key features of most programming languages. Like the comparison table here for D programming language:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/comparison.html

Hi,

This is my first blog post to GNU Smalltalk world. Actually, I'm not a "blog guy" but I'll give it a try because the message I sent mailing list yesterday didn't arrived (anyone has an idea? This happens to me always with mailing lists :-( ) and I'm impatient to meet GNU Smalltalk community.