81–90 of 154 posts
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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.
There are Lisps with similar semantics. It faded (further) out of popularity for a number of reasons, but it still has its niche.
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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.
Last time I touched Erlang, "Learn you some Erlang for great good!" was fresh out of the printers.
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 would give a lot for a version of Squeak which could instantiate standard GUI controls and easily compile to a stand-alone binary or HTML page w/ included JavaScript.
It ain't a version of Squeak, though.
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.
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There are Lisps with similar semantics. It faded (further) out of popularity for a number of reasons, but it still has its niche.
Which Lisps were those? I'm kinda interested in this space.
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And some months ago I was flirting with the idea of "Smalltalk and Erlang had a baby" and have Smalltalk syntax to an actor environment ran by a Erlang VM style. Plus some insanely cool ideas about a causal debugger for distributed bugs. The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it. Although, thinking long term and for understendabilitymaxxin…
I was flirting with the idea ... Plus some insanely cool ideas ... The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it. We've come to this. The mere existence of AI is discouraging people from pursuing creative ideas. This is a catastrophe! It's not just taking the fun out of life, it's destroying alternative futures we might have built. There is th…
experts will emerge from this convenience focused paradigm we are entering so the output quality will certainly improve imo.
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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.
While I appreciate guest languages for bringing new ideas to specific language platforms, at the end of the day I rather use those that are developed alonside the platform, hence Erlang instead of Elixir, at least if I would be ever doing something with it again. Last time I touched Erlang, "Learn you some Erlang for great good!" was fresh out of the printers.
I've just not had time to learn further. As swapping between languages when trying to complete my original Tcl project is tricky. I'm now poking around with Crystal.
A rookie example of erlang and converting strings to base16. I posted in haste a while ago on Tcl's IRC but fun. Never did implement the teddy bear colour.
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.
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.
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.