61–70 of 141 posts
Does anyone know where the strange name VisualAge came from? Wikipedia says "The name "VisualAge" is the result of a contest between the members of the development team." with no reference, and I can't understand how such an opaque and irrelevant-seeming name could win such a contest. "Visual" I get, but "Age"?
One of the things that Allen only barely hints at and I'm not sure Gilads piece really touches on was the shifting economics in Software development. In 1995/96 when Java gut punched the wind out of Smalltalk and the other OO solutions (CLOS, Eifel, Beta, etc), they spent a butt load on marketing and gave the stuff away for free. In other industries it would be called "dumping." It wasn't just Sun giving Java away. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see Go as anything more than tripe aimed at commoditized development. Yay at being a cog in a giant machine. Smalltalk and the ideas it was based on revolutionized personal computing. There is raw, unbridled genius in it and that should be widely recognized.
> Smalltalk and the ideas it was based on revolutionized personal computing. There is raw, unbridled genius in it and that should be widely recognized. This is not historically correct. What we understand today by "personal computer" was described by Butler Lampson in his famous paper in 1972 and was first realized in the famous Alto Computer. The first desktop GUI and the first WYSIWYG applications for the Alto were…
For those of you smalltalk fans, what are you working in today / what would you prefer to be working in today given your history with smalltalk?
Those are all very good points. Since Allen was there and I was not he is in a far better position to know. But my impression was that the Smalltalk group had been reasonably happy with their 8086 based NoteTaker computer and expected their partners (HP, Tektronix, Apple and DEC) to use commercial processors instead of designing custom ones. Even if they were far slower than the Xerox Dorado. About Squeak in a web br…
Yes, my recollection of the Squeak browser plugin was that the performance was indistinguishable from running regular Squeak, several orders of magnitude better than SqueakJS. And the startup time was vastly better than any Java plugin code. However, if you were on dial-up, and your browser didn't already have a cached copy of the smalltalk image, then you were in for a quite a wait. (Though no doubt this could have…
I did have to do some persuading to get IT to install the plugin in the first place though.
It was doomed tech in hindsight though, together with all the other plugins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean that the morphic ui is archaic looking ? Because my impression of it is that it is still ahead of its time technically.
What you can download from https://selflanguage.org/ looks rather archaic, not the improved version implemented on top of Squeak which looks and feals really fancy.
I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk. 1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95. 2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods. 3. The text was the IBM manu…
I took my first college-level programming class a year earlier than you, using Smalltalk, and I hated the language. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But in high school I had programmed in C, and earlier than that in HyperTalk and earlier still in Basic. I was too immature at the time to see the similarities between HyperTalk and Smalltalk, and too hung up on what I thought of as C’s close-to-the-machine nature to appreciate Smalltalk’s high-level power.
I think that my previous programming experience — which really wasn’t very extensive! — made it more difficult for me to understand what was good and desirable about Smalltalk. It really was Blub for me.
But I don’t blame Smalltalk for that; I blame me. I was 18, immature, unable to imagine a world outside my head, and with strikingly little actual experience. I’d like to blame all that on my age, but of course there are folks who were better on these metrics at the same age.
(I stuck with my major, though in large part because later classes were all in C, and maybe one was in Lisp and another in Java — it has been so long now that I cannot remember. Glad I did!)
I had some early experience. A Xerox Special Information Systems salesperson gave me a one month Smalltalk license for my 1108 Lisp Machine. I really enjoyed it but I had already gone down the Lisp rabbit hole. Years later, a friend at Parcplace gave me a license but I got sucked into the Java world soon after (Sun had a link for a year on their main Java web page to a blog article I wrote on Java; for about 10 years I was the number one search result for 'java consultant').
I am back to using Common Lisp almost exclusively for my own projects and research but I do enjoy Pharo Smalltalk, and can't help but wonder if a free Pharo had been available in the mid to late 1990s how that might have changed things. Probably not much because Java does fit a good enterprise niche, but with the high license costs of Smalltalk, that war was lost.
I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk. 1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95. 2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods. 3. The text was the IBM manu…
Had you programmed at all prior to college? I took my first college-level programming class a year earlier than you, using Smalltalk, and I hated the language. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But in high school I had programmed in C, and earlier than that in HyperTalk and earlier still in Basic. I was too immature at the time to see the similarities between HyperTalk and Smalltalk, and too hung up on what I thou…