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Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

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Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#21

Post by hboon »

rahoulb wrote: post #19
stormbrew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a level where the concept makes a lot of sense, but even with things like docker or vagrant or ec2 images there is still an expectation that you keep around enough information to replicate the image from scratch, be it a shell script or chef or puppet or a dockerfile. Smalltalk's images didn't really have this feature.

I was always told to fileout my work and then filein into a blank image to remove any cruft that accumulates during development. That's pretty much the same?

There were 2 camps. I like to do my work with a single image over months, saving code to a native (Smalltalk) version control system. Just doing the occasional testing with a fresh image and loading my code in to verify things are doing fine, as well as when deploying.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#22

Post by vidarh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #15
vidarh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you believe Simula is lacking to make it fully OO.

See http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/slides/2007/simula-small... . The main omission is encapsulation.

Simula does provide encapsulation - it often considered the first language to do so.

It does not provide an easy mechanism for information hiding of the encapsulated instance variables.

I think that is an exceedingly weak argument against calling it OO, especially as you AFAIK can do information hiding in Simula by using the simulation support that was it's raison-d'etre, namely by using the object lifecycle and co-routine support and starting a method to encapsulate state as part of the class body (constructor, effectively).

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#24

Post by agumonkey »

pjmlp wrote: post #10

Nice article, but it fails to explain the experience using Smalltalk environment really is. Smalltalk, like Lisp Machines, was originally a blend of GUI operating system, development environment and the first real IDE.

It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#25

Post by overgard »

Smalltalk is incredibly cool, but I think one of the main things stunting it is it doesn't have a great free implementation. The only modern smalltalk environment I've used which felt like a serious environment was VisualWorks, and to download that you have to fill out a form and you can only use it under a "personal use" license.

Squeak, despite being impressive, has always felt like a toy. I like Pharo in spirit, but GUI wise, it looks really off. If I can use a weird metaphor to describe it: it's like reading a brilliant PhD thesis written in Comic Sans. That's what the GUI reminds me of. The content is brilliant, but the presentation really leaves you scratching your head. I know it's not fair to judge an entire development environment off its aesthetics, but people are going to do it anyway.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#26

Post by pjmlp »

agumonkey wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Nice article, but it fails to explain the experience using Smalltalk environment really is. Smalltalk, like Lisp Machines, was originally a blend of GUI operating system, development environment and the first real IDE.

It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.

I never saw UNIX as an IDE, given its command line interface with ed and vi as editors.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#27

Post by discreteevent »

davidw wrote: post #5
stormbrew wrote: post #4

I feel like a lot of the really clever and elegant things about smalltalk as a language and an object model got bogged down in the program image execution model, to the point where it stunted the evolution of those ideas for a long time. We're getting to the point where such a model is more practical now, but it still strikes me as hopelessly impractical even so. It wasn't until OSX made Objective-C take off and Rail…

Funny you should mention Erlang, as I think that in its own way, it's treading the lisp/smalltalk path of getting a few things really, really right, and being head and shoulders better for certain kinds of applications. And yet, at the same time, doomed to sooner or later have enough of its goodies ripped off by programming languages that are more mainstream, that will far surpass it in functionality. Go and Scala, f…

Dart is trying to rip off Smalltalk and Erlang while putting on Algol sheep's clothing. I have no doubt they will be successful at the Smalltalk part as most of the team seem to be ex-Smalltalkers or ex-Smalltalk VM'ers. I don't know enough about Erlang to know if Dart isolates approximate it.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#28

Post by agumonkey »

pjmlp wrote: post #26
agumonkey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.

I never saw UNIX as an IDE, given its command line interface with ed and vi as editors.

it's a different user interface paradigm, mainly it's not graphically sophisticated (independent streams of text vs dynamic bitmap overlays)and less time integrated (you have to define how and which script to run when something change). But at the time it was thought so, that's how I felt reading bits of this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environmen....

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#29

Post by lispm »

vidarh wrote: post #12
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simula and to a similar extent SketchPad are proto-OO: they planted the seeds many of the concepts that would go into OO, but Smalltalk is where the seeds were first reaped. But at the end of the day, we are arguing about a label, and its hard to tell where proto-X really becomes X (e.g. anthropologists argue about the line between proto writing and writing).

I'm curious what you believe Simula is lacking to make it fully OO.

Simula is a hybrid language made out of an imperative Algol base and extensions for OO.

Re: Today’s Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language

#30

Post by pjmlp »

agumonkey wrote: post #28
pjmlp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never saw UNIX as an IDE, given its command line interface with ed and vi as editors.

it's a different user interface paradigm, mainly it's not graphically sophisticated (independent streams of text vs dynamic bitmap overlays)and less time integrated (you have to define how and which script to run when something change). But at the time it was thought so, that's how I felt reading bits of this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environmen... .

My first UNIX experience was in 1993 with Xenix, followed by almost all commercial variants of it.

By then I was already spoiled with GUI environments from Atari ST, Amiga 500, Windows 3.x and GEM, as well as the typical MS-DOS IDEs from Borland.

So I never saw UNIX that way.

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