essay by Dave Thomas (“President and CEO of Object Technology International Inc. and Adjunct Research Professor of Computer Science at Carleton University”) reprinted from Celebrating 25 Years of #Smalltalk. #toread
on 02025-12-31here’s how to run #Smalltalk from the Linux command line: /opt/src/pharo-vm-Linux-x86_64-stable/pharo --headless nbody.pharo_run.image Include/pharo/make.st nbody.pharo; /opt/src/pharo-vm-Linux-x86_64-stable/pharo --headless nbody.pharo_run.image Include/pharo/main.st 50000000
#introduction to #Smalltalk. “Unlike Perl, I actually did use Smalltalk to build a few real applications that had real users. I miss it a lot.”
on 02025-11-05Dan Ingalls on why the #Smalltalk logo is a hot-air balloon; it’s from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne #history
on 02025-08-27"SmallJS" is #Smalltalk in #JS #toread
on 02025-08-27Trygve Reenskaug, at 90 years old, decided to quit #Smalltalk in #Squeak 5.3 in 02020 because “The Squeak programs I have written over the past 20 years are effectively lost because I can’t port them to a current version of Squeak.” Vanessa Freudenberg agrees, “Having worked with a beautifully tiny system like Smalltalk-78, or even early versions of Squeak, the complexity in modern Squeak is staggering. / Smalltalk used to be a system that can be fully understood by a single person - truly a personal computing system. That is no longer the case. / All the functionality we added over the years comes at the price of complexity (not to mention speed). It makes the system hard to understand. It makes it hard to see the design principles. We have not found a way to eliminate, or at least hide, any of the complexity we introduced. / I don't think there is a “solution” for this within the current system. We have accepted the complexity, and now we have to live with it. And we have to accept that that alienates people who are looking for simplicity and elegance.” #small-is-beautiful
on 02024-09-07Alan Kay’s #paper on the Early #History of #Smalltalk and #OO
on 02024-09-02my “#Smalltalk performance and Moore’s Law” post
on 02024-01-25The Apple #Newton application architecture, inspired somewhat by #Smalltalk virtual memory systems like LOOM
on 02023-07-19#PDF #paper about the origins of #GemStone #Smalltalk
on 02023-07-19A #virtual-memory #Smalltalk using the "Mneme" persistent object store from UMass in 01990. #PDF #paper
on 02023-07-19a #PDF paper by Ted Kaehler about the #LOOM #Smalltalk #virtual-memory system, written in 01986, almost seven years later.
on 02023-07-19#PDF #paper of Ted Kaehler's "LOOM" design for #Smalltalk virtual memory using short oops for in-RAM objects.
on 02023-07-12another “by the Blue Book” implementation of #Smalltalk under the free-software MIT license
on 02023-07-02Tudor Gîrba’s "Glamorous Toolkit" is a free-software “moldable development environment”, putting code editing and data visualization in the same interface, an extension of Pharo #Smalltalk; #Hinsen says, “The first software system that I can seriously imagine to replace Emacs for me.”
on 02021-01-13“Microelectronics and the Personal Computer”, Alan #Kay’s 1977 SciAm article about #Smalltalk and the Dynabook and other things. Kind of a shorter, updated “As We May Think”, echoing Engelbart in some ways. So simulation-centric it actually contains the phrase, “already created simulations, such as a general text editor”.
on 02017-07-23#PDF of #paper “Reviving Smalltalk-78: the First Modern #Smalltalk Lives Again” #history #retrocomputing
on 02017-04-18