gsaga

I've looked at this article titled [Design Principles Behind Smalltalk](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html), and I can't see anything in Smalltalk that's not available in Java or Kotlin as well. I understand that Smalltalk is where the OOP ideas originated, but is it worth learning Smalltalk in 2019, even if just as a side project, for an amateur programmer reasonably familiar with OOP principles and techniques?

The idea that Smalltalk is a fully featured system which provides you with everything you might want to do with a computer reminds me of Emacs and Temple OS. Also, the blog I mentioned above seems to present Smalltalk as the perfect programming language.

I would state up front that I'm a vim user and don't have much experience with either emacs or vs code. But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar:

1. Programmable

2. Configurable

3. Can be used for programming in a variety of languages and frameworks

4. Bloated(?)

Hell, there's even an org mode plugin for vs code!

So, is it reasonable to view vs code (and atom?) as the successors of emacs, or as the emacs of modern day?

And if I'm thinking about jumping to something more feature rich than vim, should I jump to emacs or vs code(atom?)? I know that vim can be made feature rich with plugins, but you are lying to yourself if you say that vim can do anything an IDE can.

I'm a relatively inexperienced cs student and am interested in learning Mathematica/Wolfram Language. It's a great tool and can do amazing things, but whenever I tried to actually 'learn to program' in this language, I couldn't get very far. My experience is mostly with OOP. I've heard that it's based on lisp and is a functional language. I've tried to teach myself WL with the tutorials included with the package but they seem to be lacking, in that they assume a level of familiarity with the language, and the official examples look like a brainfuck program to me.

What path should I follow if I want to teach myself Wolfram language?

I'm a computer science student and I consider myself good at coding, that is, designing the structure of programs, utilizing abstraction, managing states, and other OOP concepts(that's what I'm familiar with, I've started looking into functional programming). But I'm not very good at competitive coding.

Some of my classmate are good at competitive coding but the 'software' they create is just horrible (nested if/for/while blocks which are 5 levels deep, overly complicated code, stuff which can be simplified by just throwing in some POJO's).

Is the fact that I'm bad at competitive coding a symptom of something serious (weak foundations in algorithms/data structures)? Am I missing out on something?

I recently started looking into the source code of clojure compiler. It helped me understand some data structures like bit partitioned tries, red-black trees and persistent collections, but I'm having trouble going beyond these structures and understanding how they fit together. There are a lot of interfaces in the code and almost no documentation explaining what they mean. Hence sometimes, I find myself getting stuck at some tests which might be meaningful to someone familiar with the source. The codebase is really clean btw, but I'm a student and don't know much about language design. And I'm having trouble keeping everything I read in my head. Intellij is of great help for jumping around the codebase but it can only do so much.

Are there any resources describing clojure's internals? I've already looked at the blog series at hyperion.com. What other advice would you give someone diving into a big codebase?