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Squeak 6.1

squeak.org

131–140 of 152 posts

Re: Squeak 6.1

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Prolog and Assembly!

Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.

It does though. It teaches you that closed source is still open source in many many ways. Especially when you have something like Ghidra or IDA Pro. Nowadays this is even more true because LLMs can speed up retrieval of missing knowledge way more quickly. Back in the day I had to search for stuff but I bet now that LLMs give a decent guess at decompilation of something. Also it's the systems programming language and requires you to dive into the computer architecture of things. Try that with Python or JavaScript.

Re: Squeak 6.1

#132
I've been tempted to learn this so I could port my Pips solver to it, solely because PipSqueak would be a good name.

Re: Squeak 6.1

#133
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Did you dream of ColdStore (https://coldstore.sourceforge.net/rationale.html) ?

Re: Squeak 6.1

#134
post #2

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.

Georgia Tech in the Mark Guzdial days?

I was about to make the same comment. Squeak and Scheme were mind expanding points of curriculum for me.

I still remember writing a Ga Tech themed version of The Sims in Squeak. I felt omnipotent being able to inspect or modify any object while debugging the game mechanics engine I’d written; that was a fun project.

Re: Squeak 6.1

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have at least eight different GUIs implemented in Squeak and also native Xwindows, macOS, iPhone and Windows. Plus several through the FFI interface. And three/seven Web GUI interfaces. We used to run (around 2009) Squeak on more platforms than Linux, they all still work in the 32 versions. I'll make the old bitrotted GUI's work again in the latest Squeak 6.1 if you pay me a few thousand euro's. I count many more n…

> And three/seven Web GUI interfaces.

Is there one that uses html (text, div) and not canvas/bitmap?

Re: Squeak 6.1

#137
post #16
post #2

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.

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.

For me, that was my "I'm getting out of here before I break it irreversibly" moment while working through some introductory tutorial ~20 years ago; I've never touched Smalltalk again. I can't understand why being bespoke and unreproducible would be a desirable thing for software.

(Yes, clearly I don't "get it". Happy to hear explanations.)

Re: Squeak 6.1

#138
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[dead]

Re: Squeak 6.1

#139
post #109

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.

Can I suggest you take a look at Cuis Smalltalk (a simplified fork from squeak), and any of the talks given by Juan Vuletich (main author of cuis). In Cuis, Juan took morphic back to basics and updated it heavily. Now submorphs use relative geometry (not absolute), and everything is hardware accelerated vector graphics - EVEN THE FONTS. Seriously, reading Unicode enhanced code in a 45 degree tilted editor window, whi…

https://cuis.st/

Re: Squeak 6.1

#140
post #103
post #5

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.

Cuis Smalltalk has full high-DPI support as its GUI is based on vector graphics: https://cuis.st/

Wow, never heard of it! Thank you!
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