Objective-C, the language of choice for Cocoa development, is the surprising and delicious combination of C and Smalltalk. In fact, the whole Objective-C object model, including the message sending syntax, is modeled after Smalltalk. This proximity makes it easy for Objective-C programmers to learn and use Smalltalk efficiently. In this session, we will provide a gentle introduction to Smalltalk, at the attention of Objective-C programmers.

Some Smalltalk knowledge will give you a better feeling of the power and possibilities of dynamic object-oriented languages like Objective-C and new perspectives on the design of object-oriented applications or frameworks with Cocoa. Moreover, it will allow you to understand, and often leverage in the context of your Objective-C programming activity, the huge and ever-evolving corpus of Smalltalk literature and community discussion, and it should give you a better understanding of various proposal about possible additions to the Objective-C language.

Smalltalk, which is often viewed as the most advanced mainstream object-oriented language in use today, is supported by various commercial and open-source groups. In this session, we will make use of several Smalltalk implementations available for Mac OS X, including Squeak, VisualWorks, Ambrai Smalltalk and F-Script.