For a lot of people, having to work inside the “walled garden” of a VM, with its own GUI and everything, is one of the biggest barriers to learning Smalltalk. Today I made a little video about one way that working in this environment can actually be empowering.

By the way, full disclosure: I cheated a little bit, because someone told me where I should look for the message whitelist. But! Nobody told me how to trace from the GUI all the way back back to the class and method the whitelist is found in. I was able to work that out for myself, and pretty quickly too. This is one of the benefits of working in a highly explorable and reflective development environment.

As before, the Smalltalk I’m using is Pharo 4.