(Moved from Smalltalk Faq to keep it from balooning too much)
Q: Of the various Smalltalk Environments, which ones are used by Wiki Zens for commercial projects?
A: Let's do a vote by counting. This is purely a popularity contest, disregarding actual usefulness.
Visual Works [0]
Visual Age [1]
Squeak Smalltalk [0]
Smalltalk Em Tee [0]
Object Studio [0]
Gnu Smalltalk [0]
Smalltalk Ecks [1]
Sharp Smalltalk [0]
Amber Smalltalk [1]
Q: Same question, but this time, give your opinion on the usefulness of the environment.
A: Vote using the scale [0-5], vote for as many as you have an opinion on, but only once per environment. 0 is 'Dead' or 'Useless', 3 is 'It can get the job done', 4 is 'I like it and enjoy using it', and 5 is 'This is my number one choice!'
Visual Works [4]
Visual Age [5]
Squeak Smalltalk [3]
Object Studio [1]
Smalltalk Ecks [4]
Amber Smalltalk [4]
Q: Can Squeak Smalltalk do application development? Is it just limited to "toy" research and educational uses?
A: I like Squeak and I've played around with it a fair bit. My complaints on Squeak are too numerous to enumerate, but they're almost all minor. Squeak's biggest fault is performance. It's not slow for general development use or simple solutions, but it is a CPU hog. So, Squeak wouldn't be my first choice for serious application development, but I think it certainly could be used in solving certain kinds of problems. -- Jeff Panici
Q: What's the big difference between Visual Works and Object Studio? Is it just the platform dependency thing, or is there more to it?
Q: Has anyone used Dolphin Smalltalk extensively? What are its shortcomings (if any) when compared with the other commercial Smalltalks?
Q: Why would I use Visual Works over the other Smalltalks?
A: I use two Small Talk environments on a regular basis: Smalltalk Em Tee and Visual Works. Smalltalk Em Tee is my "Windows Specific" Small Talk, which we use for our game development. Visual Works is a purer Small Talk. I like both. I think Visual Works has the largest user community, a good licensing system, and a lot of history.
I would pick the Small Talk environments that are right for you and the kinds of software you're trying to develop. -- Jeff Panici
Visual Works is bloated and it's class libraries look like they've been designed by an infinite number of monkeys. Visual Works is the Java of Smalltalk. -- Sunir Shah
Q: Why would I use Dolphin Smalltalk over the other Smalltalks?
A: Some reasons: it has pretty good UI that can make your learning curve shorter and it is pretty good integrated with Windows. If you're sticked in Windows and have no particular performance requirements (GC issues are worth considering too) Dolphin is your choice. -- Pavel Perikov
Q: Why would I use Squeak Smalltalk over the other Smalltalks?
A: It's open source and being actively developed by many of the original Smalltalk team, such as Alan Kay. In fact, Squeak's image is incredibly old, dating back decades. It is Smalltalk and Smalltalk is Squeak. Of course, history isn't enough to make me care either.
Squeak's main research point is Morphic Interface, stolen from Self Language. They've given up on the widget hierarchy that they invented and the rest of the world has adopted and moved onto a more powerful paradigm. Squeak is a toy, but a serious toy.
A: Because it's the language underpinning Open Croquet, and you want to do Croquet development.
A: Because it comes bundled with many resources for teaching computing to children, and you want to teach computing to your kids (or to a classroom of them).
Q: Why would I use Smalltalk Em Tee over the other Smalltalks?
Q: Why would I use Visual Age over the other Smalltalks?
A: Because you have legacy Visual Age code. Visual Age is dead.
A: Visual Age is no more dead than any other Smalltalk. You may discard or ignore the Visual Age interface builder, it is worse than useless. Ibm Smalltalk, (the Smalltalk environment provided by Visual Age) however, is robust, well-factored, and reasonably well supported. The repository (Envy Developer) is head and shoulders above every alternative. The environment integrates easily and gracefully with external libraries and utilities. The graphics support is well-integrated with the underlying platform, easy to extend, and easy to code. With all due respect to the cynics here, Visual Age is a better Smalltalk than Visual Works, and IBM is a more reliable supplier than Cincom. The other Smalltalks may be interesting niche players, but are basically share-ware, for better or worse. I use Visual Age over the other Smalltalks because it is commercially available, robust and reliable, has reasonable performance, and supports a rich set of secondary add-ons and extensions. Most of the time, after a reasonably gentle learning curve, it basically stays out of the way and lets you focus on whatever you're trying to accomplish. It generally provides some existing way to do just about anything I want to do, and seldomly gets in the way when I have to customize or extend that way. Easy things are easy, hard things are possible.
See also: Smalltalk Implementations
See original on c2.com 