First, I wanted to write "small talk" as "smalltalk" (or, roughly Smalltalk.) Perhaps I'll note at the outset that I've always wanted to learn some Smalltalk, just because I feel I should. It's just a little tough to take the time these days, as I find myself also wanting to learn Ruby (to play with Ruby on Rails) and PHP, which Drupal, the software driving this site, is written in.

Don't get me wrong, I could download Squeak and go through some demos and then maybe I'd know something of Smalltalk. But that's not really knowing or learning Smalltalk. And light hacking of Drupal is not learning PHP. I'm closest, at this point, to feeling I'm learning Ruby, but for the most part, it's just been hacking around. I wouldn't dream of putting any of the three of them on my resume. Basically, I feel that I need to be able to sit down and actually turn out some light code off the top of my head before I'll even think of suggesting I know a language.

This came to mind largely because I find I don't make small talk very well, and that leads to poor mingling skills. Now, I no longer feel like writing about that, other than to say it's a skill I need to develop. I have a feeling, for instance, that the person I was talking to about the Student Bar Association website work that I'm doing wasn't the least bit interested in the details of keeping content fresh that I found myself addressing.

Maybe if I download and try out Squeak I can make small talk about Smalltalk?