101–110 of 154 posts
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Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder. I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently. Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.
Elixir brings mostly a new syntax, and little more. I rather use Gleam IF i really need to use the BEAM. Other than that, vanilla Erlang is THE way to go.
Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means. I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum. Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.
I didn't understand programming at all until I read about (not even tried) Smalltalk. And it's because of Smalltalk I write Ruby today. My favourite thing about it is the lack of "reserved words" - just a handful of punctuation marks. It's incredibly pure - almost all of the syntax is "send this message to this object".
Nowadays I write a lot of TypeScript and prefer having a type system (especially for agentic coding), but Ruby is one of my favorite languages to write myself :)
And after all these years, still no fixes for high-DPI displays. The UI is still pixely and slow. Perhaps I should take Fable and try myself, this was the only bug I cared about and it is not solved after 10 years at least.
Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means. I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum. Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.
Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten. All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.
Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions.
Apple, Walmart, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon - they all use Clojure. Google and Grammarly use Common Lisp.
Check the GitHub language stats and be surprised to see Emacs Lisp among the visible top. There's so much Elisp on GitHub alone - it's just effing crazy. That fact alone at least should be surprising. Remember? This is a not a general-purpose language - it's made for one and only thing, tis a damn configuration language for a text editor. And no, it isn't "some old stuff", check r/emacs - new packages get announced daily! I'm not even exaggerating - new stuff for Emacs comes every single day. Who the heck are all these psychos? Have they not realized how "forgotten" and "dead" Lisp was?
Seriously though, Lisp dialects are enormously practical, it is inconceivable today to find a runtime where you just can't run stuff built with a Lisp. And Lispers keep adding more - Janet, Jank, Jolt, Fennel, Clojure-Dart, Cljbang, Squint - all are pretty young, yet already not some "useless toys" - they're used to build real stuff.
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For me, Smalltalk's "wow" moment was the concept of a persistently running image, with the developer's job being to mould and manipulate it into the shape s/he wants.
The only mainstream-ish language where that still happens? R. Too bad, there's a lot more use cases for this sort of thing now - versioning, anything non-persistent agents touch, collaboration, auditable enterprise LOB. It's 2026, why are we (or our agents) still writing serialization code? Even if the AI's write the boilerplate, the state management fragility is often a tax/risk.
Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means. I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum. Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.
Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten. All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.
And after all these years, still no fixes for high-DPI displays. The UI is still pixely and slow. Perhaps I should take Fable and try myself, this was the only bug I cared about and it is not solved after 10 years at least.
The UI has been a huge impediment in my getting into Squeak development. Every couple years I decide I will try it again, and then see that very little has changed. It's a shame. Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo was supposed to be the future, but it feels like an IDE stuck in the 90's.
I count many more native GUI support in all Smalltalk versions https://github.com/jeceljr/SmalltalkSurvey
Squeak goes back all the way to 1972, we ran on most GUIs in existence. Smalltalk was the invention of the first GUI. https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
See many of my old comments on my 18 years on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=morphle
I even have the most scalable (massively parallel) GUI written in a few thosand lines of code: https://youtu.be/f1605Zmwek8?t=3100
And several 3D GUIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM&t=4s and the highly scalable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQTeWJNkylI
What are the best books/papers/blog posts to learn about Morphic's architecture? I'm not a user of any Smalltalk implementation but I'd like to learn more as the Smalltalk approach to UI is very interesting.
Seriously, reading Unicode enhanced code in a 45 degree tilted editor window, while zooming in and out just for kicks (all of this can be done by manipulating the morph with its halo's menu) just to see how crisp everything is - thats FUN!
Also, try taking apart the standard system browser (4 panes + editor), rearrange everything as per your tastes (by drag & drop), and ... everything still works
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Ive always "dreamed" of having something like the ST image but backed by persistent virtual memory, not simply RAM. (Crudely) mmap the ST image to a 100GB file and just change pages. Let the OS flush the pages back and forth. Maybe full boat, heap sweeping GCs would be Bad as it pages the entirety of the heap in and out. But we have (had) lots of RAM these days. We have generational GCs that leave idle stuff alone. I…
Sounds a somewhat like GemStone/S I think also IBM has or had somewhat similar concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone/S
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterSystems_Cach%C3%A9
Which I heard about from a friend who was using it at work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_object_database_...
Caché is first one in the table.
I remember object or object relational databases were popular at one time. maybe they still are to some extent.