This should be interesting. Before encountering (Smalltalk-inspired) Objective-C a few years ago and then (also Smalltalk-inspired) Ruby, my primary experience with OOP had been C++ and Java – both of which had left a rather sour taste in my mouth. Sure, I could see a few advantages, but they didn’t seem worth it – and now I realize why. Most development in those languages is really OINO – OOP In Name Only. People actually program procedurally, and create just as much (sometimes more!) spaghetti code as in traditional procedural languages!

One thing about Smalltalk that I think encourages “true” OOP development is the way that the development environment works. In C++ and Java, the file and class are the units of account – but in Smalltalk, all you see is one method at a time. I think this is an important observation; it actually encourages the developer to think more granularly, developing smaller and more targeted methods. Methods are visually separated from the class definition from each other – even instance and class methods are completely visually separated. My hypothesis is that this has a valuable psychological impact on design.

Interestingly, though, Ruby and Python developers still seem to do this. Perhaps not with the tenacity that Smalltalk programmers seem to, but I don’t seem to find ridiculously long procedures-masquerading-as-methods in their applications as often. Maybe it’s because of the nature of the communities, or maybe I just don’t have a large enough sampling of code. In any case, it’s an observation.

So, we’ll see how I do with this little project. I don’t imagine it should be too terribly difficult – the problem seems easily solved, at least from a distance. But now my first decision – how do I store puzzles?

This may not be as trivial as it sounds. The old-style Perl programmer in me wants to store it as a packed string. The C programmer wants a multi-dimensional array. The Lisper wants perhaps an array, perhaps a list of lists. But what’s the Smalltalk Way? A multi-dimensional array of “Cell” objects?