Smalltalk
Oct 24, 2003
Last summer there was a used book sale in Poughkeepsie and among the other sub-$1 treasures was a copy of the Digitalk Smalltalk/V tutorial and programming handbook. The paperback shipped with the first widely available commercial Smalltalk for IBM PC and Macintosh in 1986. Smalltalk was the first object-oriented language I used so I popped the buck and thought I’d get around to looking through it to refresh my memory. It ended up on my bookshelf, unread.
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Smalltalk, for the unintiatated, is the first pure object-oriented language and the first graphical integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970’s. PARC later licensed Smalltalk-80 through PARCplace/Digitalk and then, when Xerox cut it loose, became the commercial entity Cincom. Fast forward to Squeak. Squeak is a free, liberally licensed (though maybe not strictly OpenSource or DFSG free), actively developed Smalltalk released by one of the original Smalltalk authors, Alan Kay. I’ve been aware of it for a while but have not had the inclination to play with it.
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Last week I saw another reference to Squeak. It was Sunday and I was on-call, so sort of confined to the house, and I figured I would download the virtual machine (VM) and image to take a whack at Smalltalk again. You know what? It’s fun. It’s not what I do at work. It’s different and in lots of ways better than I remember. I’m having a good time. I bought a used copy of Chamond Liu’s Smalltalk, Objects and Design and, for nostalgia, one of Adele Goldberg’s Smalltalk 80: The Language (aka the purple book). I found EMACS key bindings for squeak. I’m digging into the class libraries and really liking it. Even if I don’t do a damn thing with it the exercise feels worthwhile and, I might add, it’s not work.