Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk

https://noelrappin.com/blog/2025/11/ruby-and-its-neighbors-smalltalk/

by jrochkind1 • 9 months ago

229 143 9 months ago

postexitus• 9 months ago

What this blog omits to mention and I think the most impressive part of Smalltalk ecosystem is the structure of the image - the application's state that you can freeze and distribute and resume elsewhere (makes supporting client side applications so much easier). The Smalltalk image is a very interesting beast. Look at it as a kind of immortality. Many current Smalltalk systems, Pharo, Squeak, VisualWorks among them, share a common ancestor, that is, a Smalltalk image from Xerox PARC. This common ancestor however is not some remote thing, but actually still alive in those modern systems. The modern variants were produced by sending messages to the objects in that image. Some of those messages actually morphed the current objects. Classes are full-blown objects, and creating new classes is done by sending messages to class objects. Some of the objects in a Smalltalk image may date back to 1972, when the first Smalltalk image bootstrapped! Smalltalk images never die, they just fade into something potentially fundamentally different. You should view your application building as not fundamentally different from creating a new Smalltalk version.

criddell• 9 months ago

makes supporting client side applications so much easier

I was thinking that supporting a Smalltalk application must be a nightmare because it is so malleable. Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?

supportengineer• 9 months ago

Correct, at least that was true when I was a Smalltalk developer.

Qem• 9 months ago

Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?

That should make the Smalltalk family popular with free software proponents. That makes me curious why that is not the case in history. The efforts of FSF on Smalltalk pale in comparison with those on C, Lisp and other languages.

e12e2• 9 months ago

I used to think so, then watched as javascript in the browser rose to be the premium application platform - where the user has access to a console/repl, developer tools etc...

igouy20• 9 months ago

Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?

End users? Yes if you - want them to - let them; No if you - don't want them to - stop them.

ssdspoimdsjvv2• 9 months ago

Smalltalk being so malleable also makes it possible to completely disable source code inspection/execution.

hboon• 9 months ago

In several implementations you can strip the image down (to remove the dev tools, etc). And some let you ship as single file executables

Scubabear684• 9 months ago

The image concept, in my opinion, is what really limited Smalltalk's appeal and distribution.

The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

Think of today's modern systems and open source, with so many libraries easily downloadable and able to be incorporated in your system in a very reproducible way. Smalltalk folks derided this as a low tech, lowest-common-denominator approach. But in fact it gave us reusable components from disparate vendors and sources.

The image concept was a huge strength of Smalltalk but, really in the end in my opinion, one of the major areas that held it back.

Java in particular surged right past Smalltalk despite many shortcomings compared to it, partially because of this. The other part of course was being free at many levels. The other half of Smalltalk issues beyond the image one, was the cost of both developer licenses ($$$$!) and runtime licenses (ugh!).

fellowniusmonk• 9 months ago

For this very reason I'm working on a development platform that makes all changes part of a cheaply stored crdt log. The log is part of the application, there are some types of simulations inside of this that we can only timestamp and replay but we can always derive the starting position with 100% accuracy.

lawlessone• 9 months ago

Isn't this kinda where AI is now?

Like with LLM's it seems impossible to separate the "reasoning" from data it has stored to learn that reasoning.

Barrin92• 9 months ago

the entire philosophy of Smalltalk was to think of software artifacts as living entities. You can just find yourself in a piece of software, fully inspect everything and engage with it by way of a software archaeology. To do away with the distinction between interacting, running and writing software.

They wanted to get away from syntax and files, like an inert recipe you have to rerun every time so I think if you do away with the image you do away with the core aspect of it.

Computing just in general didn't go the direction they wanted it to go in many ways I think it was too ambitious of an idea for the time. Personally I've always hoped it comes back.

sebastianconcpt4• 9 months ago

It wasn't the image concept. You use it every day in Docker containers for everything else.

But saving the image has some drawbacks. Mutability always requires special care.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

Agreed with that; this is why I think it should unite both the "scripting" as well as image approach, at the same time.

cess114• 9 months ago

Contemporary Smalltalks support git.

btilly• 9 months ago

I agree that the image concept was a problem, but I think that you're focused on the wrong detail.

The problem with an image based ecosystem that I see is that you are inevitably pushed towards using tools that live within that image. Now granted, those tools are able to be very powerful because they leverage and interact with the image itself. But the community contributing to that ecosystem is far smaller than the communities contributing to filesystem based tools.

The result is that people who are considering coming into the system, have to start with abandoning their familiar toolchain. And for all of the technical advantages of the new toolchain, the much smaller contributor base creates a worse is better situation. While the file-based system has fundamental technical limitations, the size of the ecosystem results in faster overall development, and eventually a superior system.

mpweiher3• 9 months ago

> most impressive part of Smalltalk ecosystem is the structure of the image
The image concept, in my opinion, is what really limited Smalltalk's appeal and distribution.

I'd say these statements are both true. The image concept is very impressive and can be very useful, it certainly achieved a lot of bang for very little buck.

And it also was/is one of the major impediments for Smalltalk, at least after the mid 1980s.

The impressive bit is shown by pretty much the entire industry slowly and painfully recreating the Smalltalk image, just usually worse.

For example on macOS a lot of applications nowadays auto-save their state and will completely return to the state they were last in. So much that nowadays if you have a lot of TextEdit windows open and wish to make sure everything is safe, you kill the program, you don't quit it.

Also, all/most of the shared libraries and frameworks that come with the system are not loaded individually, instead they are combined into one huge image file that is mapped into your process. At some point they stopped shipping the individual framework and shared library binaries.

User interfaces have also trended in the direction of a an application that contains its own little world, rather than editing files that exist within the wider Unix filesystem.

The image accomplished all that and more and did so very efficiently. Both in execution speed and in amount of mechanism required: have a contiguous piece of memory. Write to disk, make a note of the start pointer. On load, map or read it into memory, fix up the pointers if you didn't manage to load at the same address and you're ready to go. On G4/G5 era Macs, the latter would take maybe a second or two, whereas Pages, for example, took forever to load if things weren't already cached, despite having much less total data to load.

But the drawbacks are also huge. You're really in your little world and going outside of it is painful. On an Alto in the mid to late 1970s I imagine that wasn't much of an issue, because there wasn't really much outside world to connect to, computer-wise, and where would you fit it on a 128KB machine (including the bitmap display)? But nowadays the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

With Objective-S, I am building on top of Cocoa's Bundle concept, so special directories that can contain executable code, data or both. Being directories, bundles can nest. You can treat a bundle as data that your program (possibly the IDE) can edit. But you can also plonk the same bundle in the Resources folder of an application to have it become part of that application. In fact, the IDE contains an operation to just turn the current bundle into an application, by copying a generic wrapper application form its own resources and then placing the current bundle into that freshly created/copide app.

Being directories, data resources in bundles can remain standard files, etc.

With Objective-S being either interpreted or compiled, a bundle with executable code can just contain the source code, which the interpreter will load and execute. Compiling the code inside a bundle to binaries is just an optimization step, the artifact is still a bundle. Removing source code of a bundle that has an executable binary is just an obfuscation/minimization step, the bundle is still the bundle.

rbanffy8• 9 months ago

The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

I worked with a similar language, Actor (Smalltalk with an Algol-like syntax), and the usual way to deal with distribution was to “pack” (IIRC) the image by pointing to the class that your app is an instance of, and the tool would remove every other object that is not a requirement of your app. With that you got an image that started directly into your app, without any trace of the development environment.

api• 9 months ago

Re: the image concept.

A lot of great ideas are tried and tried and tried and eventually succeed, and what causes them to succeed is that someone finally creates an implementation that addresses the pragmatic and usability issues. Someone finally gets the details right.

Rust is a good example. We've had "safe" systems languages for a long time, but Rust was one of the first to address developer ergonomics well enough to catch on.

Another great example is HTTP and HTML. Hypertext systems existed before it, but none of them were flexible, deployable, open, interoperable, and simple enough to catch on.

IMHO we've never had a pure functional language that has taken off not because it's a terrible idea but because nobody's executed it well enough re: ergonomics and pragmatic concerns.

cbsmith3• 9 months ago

The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

That wasn't a function of the image system. That was a product of your version control/CI/CD systems and your familiarity with them.

Consider that Docker and other container based systems also deploy images. No reason Smalltalk has to be any different.

I did software development work in Smalltalk in the 90's. We used version control (at one point, we used PVCS, which was horrible, but Envy was pretty sweet), had a build process and build servers that would build deploy images from vanilla images. Even without all that, the Smalltalk system kept a full change log of ever single operation it performed in order. In theory, someone could wipe their changelog, but that's the moral equivalent of deleting the source code for your binary. Image-based systems are no reason to abandon good engineering practices.

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

One of the reasons Java got adopted, was that Smalltalk big names like IBM decided to go all in with Java.

It is no accident that Eclipse to this day still has a code navigation perspective based on Smalltalk, it has an incremental compiler similar to Smalltalk experience, and the virtual filesystem used by Eclipse workspaces mimic the behaviour of Smalltalk images.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

That part is also cool. I'd like this in ruby too, e. g. where we could have tons of objects reflect on that state, and just resume work there. Everything is an object. Squeak everywhere, but to also retain the "scripting" (light) commandline approach. Nobody in smalltalk really understood why "scripting" is important. Python showed why.

igouy20• 9 months ago

also retain the "scripting" (light) commandline approach

Smalltalk developers preferred to do their scripting within the Smalltalk IDE, so they could use their familiar tools.

And then save their "scripting" as a text file ("fact.st").

    $ cat fact.st
    Stdio stdout 
        nextPutAll: 100 factorial printString; 
        nextPut: Character lf.!
    SmalltalkImage current snapshot: false andQuit: true!

And then "run" that text file ("fact.st") from the commandline.

    $ bin/pharo --headless Pharo10-SNAPSHOT-64bit-502addc.image fact.st

93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000

isr6• 9 months ago

Adding to what you said. Squeak was a clean open source reimplementation (by the devs who did the original Smalltalk-80), so it's real history starts from there (ie: the 90s, not the 70s)

One thing to keep in mind is that smalltalks all have the same ability to save & load code to & from disk, just as any other programming environment. But, they also have the option of just using the image to persist, and iterate on that.

Squeak overdid that aspect of it, such that over time, it became hard to prune older side projects & and it just became increasingly bloated. Both Pharo & Cuis forked from squeak at about the same time.

Pharo images are fully bootstrapped from a seed.

Cuis is not quite there yet, but cuis from its inception went on a ruthless simplification drive (the number of classes in the system was reduced by about 500% !), so that it's base is effectively a "seed", and the rest of a cuis image is built up by importing projects (from disk & git) on demand.

But yeah, curating a set of images over time is remarkably enticing & friction free. Even in cuis, I find I have to force myself to keep flushing changes to my own packages.

Its not that the tools to use files are limited. In cuis, they're not. You can work on multiple different things WITHIN THE SAME IMAGE (changes to some builtins, a couple of your own projects, etc), and the system will keep track of what belongs where. So a couple of mouse clucks will fileout the relevant code to the relevant changesets & packages.

And yet - just banging on the same image is just ... fun, easy, enticing.

mpweiher3• 9 months ago

Squeak was a clean open source reimplementation

Small correction: they actually cloned/converted the Apple Smalltalk image, so those bits remained. The VM was created from scratch by writing it in Slang, a Smalltalk dialect that was essentially equivalent to BCPL and could be translated to C.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/263698.263754

sandcat_• 9 months ago

Unless you are indeed the original author from StackOverflow, it would be polite to attribute your comment: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3617319

mccoyb• 9 months ago

Are you `robject` on Stack Overflow -- or perhaps you might explain why you copied verbatim their response to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3561145/what-is-a-smallt... without citing your source?

aaronbrethorst• 9 months ago

Bizarrely, this makes me think of sourdough starter.

hshdhdhehd2• 9 months ago

Anything like that. Dog breeds. Cultivations. Etc.

znpy• 9 months ago

Lisps have a similar concept: save-lisp-and-die: https://screwlisp.small-web.org/fundamental/sbcl-slime-eval-...

In the world of containers, I wonder if one could use this feature to interrupt the execution of some computation, save the state somewhere (disk or object storage) and once the workload has been rescheduled on some other node, basically you boot up from your image file, re-establish network connections (if necessary) and just resume computation as if nothing happened.

cben• 8 months ago

https://criu.org/ (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace) is a long-running project (i remember the name over a decade ago) worth checking... Ooh, looks like they made progress in conveniently connecting it to containers.

weakfish• 9 months ago

Your comment is an uncredited quote of the following:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/3617319

adamzwasserman• 9 months ago

thanks for this article. as a history of languages aficionado myself, I appreciate both the content and the style. thanks again for the good reading

goodthink• 9 months ago

If you love the keyword syntax of Smalltalk, the reflectivity, the incremental compilation, live debugging in the environment, check out https://newspeaklanguage.org for theSmalltalk experience in the web browser.

This is my favorite video by Newspeak's creator Gilad Bracha: https://youtu.be/BDwlEJGP3Mk?si=Z0ud1yRqIjVvT4oO

smj-edison• 9 months ago

That talk is fantastic! Just a note for anyone who's interested in Newspeak, it's more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendant of smalltalk (in a good way imo). It has some really slick features like:

* No global import/export namespace (all imports are dependency injected, meaning capability based security is already baked in)

* Nested classes instead of modules

* No variable assignment (everything is a method call)

* Mixins instead of inheritance

* Synchronization and code updates as near primitives

* Support for foreign objects through aliens and proxies, and foreign code can call newspeak objects through expats

* A native serialization to file format

* support for multiple overlapping type systems

frou_dh• 9 months ago

Since Smalltalk is effectively an OS unto itself, when we hear about the days of commercial applications being written in Smalltalk, how did deployment to end-users work?

Were the users running, say, Windows and then the Smalltalk "OS" would be running on top of that, but in a sort of "kiosk mode" where its full OS-ness was suppressed and it was dedicated to showing a single interface?

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

Easy, you make use of tree-shaking, which is actually older concept than minifying JavaScript, and add glue it together with an executable header that boots the image.

uticus• 9 months ago

I don't understand what "tree-shaking" means, can you point to a reference to give me a better understanding?

wk_end• 9 months ago

I don't feel like this really answers OP's question, which is more about the user experience than the technical approach.

When, as a dev, I use Smalltalk, it opens up what's effectively a virtual machine on my desktop. The whole Smalltalk GUI runs inside its own frame, none of the controls are native, etc. And it's a development environment - I have access to a class browser, a debugger, a REPL, and so on. I can drill down and read/modify the source code of everything. Which is great as a dev, but may be intimidating for an end user.

Is that what the end user experience is like as well? I think that's what OP is asking. I've never used a Smalltalk application as an end user to my knowledge, so I can't say myself.

arnsholt2• 9 months ago

I worked on a Smalltalk system which ran on Visual Smalltalk Enterprise, and in that system the image opened its windows as native Windows GDI windows, which made the application quite seamless in the OS (except this was in 2016-2018 and VSE was last updated in ‘99, so the look and feel was a bit dated :D).

Arcanum-XIII• 9 months ago

I used a "modern" app written in Cincom Smalltalk this year (still maintain and sold a high price), and you don't see the underlying system. Like you don't see the source code when opening any other app, in fact. The app resets the state at startup, so no lingering eternal session.

It's funny because in the past I got the chance to test izware Mirai, which is written in Lisp — when the app got into a problematic state (which was often on my machine) you were sent to the REPL where you could inspect the memory and so on. It was alien to me at the time. Today I dream of having that.

rbanffy8• 9 months ago

(still maintain and sold a high price)

I was surprised a couple years back they still maintain Mantis, a 4GL I used on a mainframe (it was kind of Rails for the 3270 terminal). Even the documentation is hideously expensive. I asked if they had a “hobby license” I could use to run under Hercules. They seemed genuinely perplexed that someone would imagine they would allow me to use their software without sacrificing my firstborn.

behnamoh• 9 months ago

Rants like this about languages which have little/no code snippets are the worst because they often sell you an idea w/o actually showing how it works in practice (because often times it doesn't work well in practice). talk is cheap, show me the fucking code, else don't waste my time.

Philpax• 9 months ago

The post is about the conceptual underpinnings of the system, not about the specifics of the code. It would be like judging the Linux kernel by the UI running atop it: it's largely immaterial to the discussion at hand.

Jtsummers3• 9 months ago

Rants like this

What about this makes you think it's a rant? Is the author making an impassioned plea for people to use Smalltalk? Is he going off on a tirade about something?

kragen3• 9 months ago

This article is more about the development environment than it is about the programming language, so it would be misleading to focus heavily on example code. A UI screencast video would be much more helpful.

kragen3• 9 months ago

You’ve likely used powerful coding editors and terminals. Smalltalk is just different. You are in the running environment.

I've experienced this a few different times: with Microsoft BASIC-80 (and GW-BASIC), with SBCL and SLIME, with LOGO, with GForth, with OpenFirmware, with MS-DOS DEBUG.COM, with Jupyter, and of course with Squeak. It really is nice.

It used to be the normal way of using computers; before memory protection, it was sort of the only way of using computers. There wasn't another memory space for the monitor to run in, and the monitor was what you used to do things like load programs and debug them. This approach continued as the default into many early timesharing systems like RT-11 and TENEX: there might be one virtual machine (memory space) per user, but the virtual machine you typed system commands into was the same one that ran your application. TENEX offered the alternative of running DDT (the debugger) in a different memory space so bugs in the application couldn't corrupt it, and that was the approach taken in ITS as well, where DDT was your normal shell user interface instead of an enhanced one.

All this seems very weird from the Unix/VMS/Win32 perspective where obviously the shell is a different process from your text editor, and it's designed for launching black-box programs rather than inspecting their internal memory state, but evolutionarily it was sort of the natural progression from a computer operator single-stepping a computer (with no memory protection) through their program with a toggle switch as they attempted to figure out why it wasn't working.

One of the nicest things about this way of working is halt-and-continue. Current versions of Microsoft Visual Studio offer sometimes halt and continue. In MBASIC you could always halt and continue. ^C halted the program, at which point you could examine variables, make arbitrary changes to the program, GOTO a line number, or just CONT to continue where you'd interrupted it. Smalltalk, SLIME, or ITS allows you to program in this way; if you like, you can refrain from defining each method (or function or subroutine) until the program tries to execute it, at which point it halts in the debugger, and you can write the code for the method and continue.

This is an extremely machine-efficient approach; you never waste cycles on restarting the program from the beginning unless you're going to debug program initialization. And in Smalltalk there isn't really a beginning at all, or rather, the beginning was something like 50 years ago.

Myself, though, I feel that the hard part of programming is debugging, which requires the experimental method. And the hard part of the experimental method is reproducibility. So I'm much more enthusiastic about making my program's execution reproducible so that I can debug faster, which conflicts with "you're in the running environment". (As Rappin says, "Code could depend on the state of the image in ways that were hard to replicate in deploys." I experience this today in Jupyter. It's annoying to spend a bunch of time trying to track down a bug that doesn't exist when you restart from scratch; worse is when the program works fine until you restart it from scratch.) So I'm much more excited about things like Hypothesis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818562) than I am about edit-and-continue.

Paul Graham wrote somewhere (I can't find it now) about how in Viaweb's early days he would often fix a bug while still on the phone with the customer who was experiencing it, because he could just tweak the running CLisp process. But you can do the same thing in PHP or with CGI without sacrificing much reproducibility—your system's durable data lives in MariaDB or SQLite, which is much more inspectable and snapshottable than a soup of Smalltalk objects pointing to each other. (#CoddWasRight!) Especially since the broad adoption of the Rails model of building your database schema out of a sequence of "migrations".

arnsholt2• 9 months ago

I found the Smalltalk way of working in the running environment to be very programmer efficient too, and that it was by far the smoothest development experience I’ve had, even in a pretty dated and clunky Smalltalk at that point. And debugging wasn’t really a problem in my experience, but we stored application state outside of the image in an SQL database (initially Sybase, then MSSQL), which probably removes some «haha, the image has some weird data saved in the dark and dusty corners» issues.

toast0• 9 months ago

But you can do the same thing in PHP or with CGI without sacrificing much reproducibility

PHP is similar, but not the same. You can't (or at least I can't) stop a request in progress and change its code; but you can rapidly change the code for the next request. Make a change in the editor, hit reload in the browser is a productive short loop, but stop at a breakpoint, inspect the state and change the code is a more powerful loop. Stopping at a breakpoint is challenging in systems with communication though, and I've learned to live without it for the most part.

kragen3• 9 months ago

Yes, I agree. I meant that you can edit code on the production web server so that the customer you're on the phone with sees their application start working. PG had the advantage that he could tweak the Lisp process for that specific user, reducing the risk of breaking the site for other concurrent users.

Database transactions bridge some of the gap between "change the code for the next request" and "stop at a breakpoint and change the code": as long as your request handler code keeps failing, it will abort the transaction, so the database is unchanged, so you can restart the transaction as many times as you want to get to the same point in execution, at least if your programming language is deterministic. By providing a snapshot you can deterministically replay from, it allows you to add log entries before the point where the problem occurred, which can be very useful.

Stopping at a breakpoint can be more productive, especially with edit-and-continue, but often it isn't. A breakpoint is a voltmeter, which you can use to see one value at every node in your circuit; logs are a digital storage oscilloscope with a spectrum analyzer, where you can analyze the history of millions or billions of values at a single node in your circuit.

jaymce• 9 months ago

thank you for this great post. my nostalgia for the late 90's ParcPlace IDE is heavy.

jimbokun• 9 months ago

So Ruby is Smalltalk but amenable to modern development practices and tools like source control and off the shelf text editors, and usable for Unix scripts.

sebastianconcpt4• 9 months ago

Basically yes.

antod• 9 months ago

Ruby is like Smalltalk, but with some Perl (for good or bad) mixed in too IMO.

vinceguidry2• 9 months ago

Ruby isn't Smalltalk. The only thing Ruby inherited from it is the pure object model. Everything else was cribbed from other languages. Ruby doesn't have what makes Smalltalk great, the image-based development model.

I'm making my own text editor in Ruby now, as I'm wishing for a more Smalltalk-like experience with it. There's just so much missing. Ruby has the reflective capability to enjoy a Smalltalk-like IDE, but Rails took over and drove Ruby in that direction long before anyone could cook one up.

Which is a shame, IDEs that aren't Smalltalk / Lisp haven't graduated past the need for static analysis despite having 50 years to do so. Now it's the red-headed stepchild of languages due to no fault of its own.

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

As someone that used Smalltalk via Smalltalk/V back in the day, I would nonetheles vouch that dev environments with direct connection to Smalltalk, like Java and .NET, are the closest we get to it in mainstream languages.

dominicrose• 9 months ago

It wouldn't be too hard to code a Smalltalk-like IDE for Ruby (compared to building a normal IDE), but the Ruby files would have to be structured in a specific way. It would not be possible to edit them using another IDE or text editor, unless you preserve the structure, but it would work well with Git.

Another issue is that the developer would have to use two IDE's, one for Ruby and one for the rest.

Everytime you access a class in the IDE, it could read the class's Ruby file into memory and split it into protocols (a protocol could just be a comment above the method name in the output Ruby file) and methods so that you can visualize them one by one the Smalltalk way.

Or - I don't recommend it but - if you really want the Smalltalk experience then: - your code would be running in the same Ruby process as the IDE - any code change would be made in the live running process - store code in a database instead of files - version control from the database instead of git

sebastianconcpt4• 9 months ago

Smalltalk is among the top most ergonomic ways to model concepts in a computer (capacity to model essential complexity) because the CPU got abstracted and compacted in the VM.

But destiny made CPUs win and now we're using AI to chew their accidental complexity for us.

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

The irony many of us used to joke about COBOL, and now we are entering book sized prompts into a little chat window.

sebastianconcpt4• 8 months ago

Haahahah true! Well put.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

I kind of like Smalltalk. Unfortunately syntax-wise Smalltalk is a huge set back and step back compared to Ruby. But Alan Kay's ideas are still epic today. I still don't think any language came close to his vision either; smalltalk definitely not. Ruby got closer but also no dice.

Elixir kind of got close too (prettier "erlang") - to have fault-tolerant mini-CPUs ("objects", aka similar to biological cells). The problem is that even people with grand ideas, such as Alan Kay, are not automatically great language designers. Matz is a better language designer than Alan Kay, for instance, whereas Alan Kay has the better ideas. It's a trade-off.

Note: I myself would not know how a language should look like that would follow Alan Kay's vision closer. It is definitely not smalltalk; it is also not ruby, though ruby is very good. I know I would suck as language designer, but as an improvement I would have a language similar to ruby (no, not crystal - crystal is a worse "ruby"), with a stronger focus on speed (perhaps have a second language that can be as fast as C here and be similar) and with a much stronger focus on what erlang brought to the table; that would get us close to, say, around 85% or 90%. And then add the rest that could fulfil Alan Kay's vision. Of course we need a specification too, because just saying "90% of his vision" is also pointless. I would perhaps start from erlang, retain the good bits, make it a modern variant of OOP (and OOP is also defined differently in different programming languages, so we need to define that term too, in the specification).

NetMageSCW2• 9 months ago

How is the syntax a step back? Smalltalk is the ultimate orthogonal language - everything is consistent. Famously the Smalltalk grammar fits on a postcard and tells you everything you need to know to understand the system from the source code.

travisgriggs2• 9 months ago

Yeah, I have no idea what shevy-java is talking about either. I would accept “huge step too far”, but not backwards. Unless your belief is that on the 8th day God gave mankind Algol syntax and said “let all languages look like this”. I’ll give that it can feel pretty foreign, like forth, lisp, erlang also do. These languages, imo, all use syntax where the form of the syntax binds nicely, reinforces even, with their computation models.

rbanffy8• 9 months ago

and I remember telling them that Smalltalk programmers were paid more.

Also much happier. C++ back then is not the C++ you use today.

bowsamic2• 9 months ago

I always found it too fragile. There’s a reason why smalltalk VMs have such good recovery features, it’s incredibly easy to brick your system when it’s all a network of objects, and I’m sure anyone who has worked in smalltalk has done so many times

shwaj• 9 months ago

I used to find it amusing that you could say `Smalltalk := nil` in the early days of Squeak, and poof! all the classes in your system are garbage collected.

(I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened, probably the system crashed before garbage collection could happen. But it was definitely a guaranteed insta-crash).

igouy20• 9 months ago

How can it be fragile if there are "such good recovery features"?

Just restore unsaved changes when you launch the same image again. That's robust not fragile.

https://drcuis.github.io/TheCuisBook/The-Change-Log.html

bowsamic2• 9 months ago

The recovery features are external, and exist to solve a problem that is specific to smalltalk

You may as well claim that computers are robust because you can just buy a new one. It has nothing to do with computers

Pretty sure ST-80 doesn’t even mandate recovery features, which is pretty scary

endlessvoid94• 9 months ago

In 2013 I built a smalltalk-esque system browser using ruby and TCL. It was fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xC5B5t5Rq8

ripe• 9 months ago

Smalltalk-80 was also good for graphics programming.

Around 1990, I was a graduate student in Prof. Red Whittaker's field robotics group at Carnegie Mellon. In Porter Hall, I was fortunate to have a Sun 3/60 workstation on my desk. It had a Smalltalk-80. I learned to program it using Goldberg & Robson and other books from ParcPlace Systems.

The programming environment was fantastic, better than anything I have seen before or since. You always ran it full screen, and it loaded up the Smalltalk image from disk. As the article says, you were in the actual live image. Editing, running, inspecting the run-time objects, or debugging: all these tasks were done in the exact same environment. When you came into the office in the morning, the entire environment booted up immediately to where you had left it the previous day.

The image had objects representing everything, including your screen, keyboard, and mouse. Your code could respond to inputs and control every pixel on the screen. I did all my Computer Graphics assignments in Smalltalk. And of course, I wrote fast video games.

I used the system to develop programs for my Ph.D thesis, which involved geometric task planning for robots. One of the programs ran and displayed a simulation of a robot moving in a workspace with obstacles and other things. I had to capture many successive screenshots for my papers and my thesis.

Everybody at CMU then wrote their papers and theses in Scribe, the document generation system written by Brian Reid decades earlier. Scribe was a program that took your markup in a plain text file (sort of at a LaTeX level: @document, @section, etc.) and generated Postscript for the printer.

I never had enough disk space to store so many full screen-size raster images. So, of course, instead of taking screenshots, I modified my program to emit Postscript code, and inserted it into my thesis. I had to hack the pictures into the Postscript generation process somehow. The resulting pictures were vector graphics using Postscript commands. They looked nice because they were much higher resolution than a screenshot could have been.

travisgriggs2• 9 months ago

I did Smalltalk for ~20 years as my primary. I’m a polyglot now, maintaining/implementing in C, Python, Swift, Kotlin, and Elixir.

The thing (for me) about Smalltalk was the thought to code ratio. It was awesome. It had a pretty good balance of less is more. Where working in Swift and Kotlin feel like trying to navigate the many nuances of American football or cricket, Smalltalk was like playing soccer/football-sans-america. The syntax is simple. And the computation model is straitforward and simple.

Elixir is kind of like that, computationally, a few simple concepts and everything builds on that. The saddest part about Elixir is that it ran with the whole do/end syntax. Drives me nuts. But I love that computationally, though different than Smalltalk, it’s like Smalltalk in that it’s a simple consistent model.

nanna• 9 months ago

Anyone working with a Smalltalk implementation?

z500• 9 months ago

I played around with Squeak this summer and made a few demos of showing how inserts and removals work in binary search trees and B-trees. I also wrote a tree-walking Smalltalk interpreter in F# and an implementation of the game of life for it. It was a blast.

lukehalko• 9 months ago

24 year old Smalltalk developer here (lmao). Thanks for this.

wolfejam• 9 months ago

Thank you for taking the time to write about Smalltalk. I have never used it, but I love all the old stories, cheers!

Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk

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