This is a great
programming environment based on Smalltalk. Freely downloadable, and
open-source as you've never known it.
I've done a version of the classic snake game (a.k.a Worm or
Nibbles) on it. It happens to be my
first Smalltalk program. You're welcome to download it.
Squeak is object-oriented, uses garbage collection, is based on a
virtual machine and has been ported to lots of architectures. Yes,
it's years ahead of Java.
Scheme
the language that Abelson and Sussman used for Structure
and Interpretation of Computer Programs
, which is the best
computer book ever, I think.
It's a pity that this language, together with its brother Common
Lisp has been snubbed by so many people, because both are
extremely elegant and flexible languages with a long history.
The bad thing about these languages is that relatively few people use them, so a lot of libraries required in today's world (SQL, http, graphics) haven't been developed, or have been developed in many incompatible versions, but not standardized. Still, if you're programming to solve a problem, rather than building software
, Lisp is a fine choice.
I don't like it much per se. I think the syntax is clumsy, and it forces you to write a lot of code that is actually not a part of your program.
But I think it's a step forward for the following reasons:slowlanguages are useless.
The undefeated standard. Portable assembler. Everybody should learn it some time. I wrote a library of efficient morphological image processing operations in C++. You can download it here. You'll need TIFFlib, and if you want graphical output, not just TIFF files, you'll need GTK+.