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Article:		Smalltalk for Everyone Else
Subject:		The Pragmatic Programmer
Date:		2006-11-28 21:53:45
From:		jeberle

Good article. I used Smalltalk/V back in the day against OS/2 PM. Went screaming back to Microsoft C in order to get anything useful done. Tried Squeak recently to investigate Croquet. I agree w/ other comments that an "environment" in the face of bash/zsh + Vim/Emacs is a serious liability. Just today I had this simple question answered. Can Smalltalk do this? Not really. Sad, because it is an amazing language. $ time ruby -e 'puts 2 ** 64' 18446744073709551616 real 0m0.045s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.009s Note, on OS X, you can get this answer out of the box.

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The Pragmatic Programmer
2007-01-25 20:05:53 jacaetevha [View]

That's funny. Running Squeak on my MacBook Pro (1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM) Time millisecondsToRun: [2 raisedTo: 64] produces the right answer and takes less than a millisecond. To be fair, that's not printing the statement like you did. So after adding a print statement in there, it takes 18 or 19 milliseconds. Your Ruby code takes 45 milliseconds.