"How's work?" "It's been forever..." "This weather!" A small-talk-hating British journalist attempted to ditch superficial conversation by heading down the pub armed with psychologist-approved lines like "What excites you right now?" and "Who is your favorite superhero?" Here's what happened.
With the Apollo app for Reddit shutting down soon, I’m going to need to start relying on Mastodon for all of my cute animal photo, gif, and story needs. #Apollo#Reddit#Animals#SmallTalk
I love occasionally explaining repeating tasks in pseudo #basic. E.g.
do x.
do y
GOTO 1
No-one learns basic anymore. Most folks can follow what i've said but they don't actually know why i said GOTO. and they don't know why that really would have been written 10, 20, 30 instead of 1, 2, 3.
Easy actually is still available. But no-one cares. #Smalltalk does such a good job at holding a beginner's hand and helping them to understand what they're looking at.
The SICP lectures and book are an amazing fundamental introduction to programming, but i can't help but think it's lost some of its simplicity in being updated from Scheme to JavaScript & i don't think they've released JS lectures.
Python can be a good starting point, but no-one wants to start there.
I had never heard of IntelligentPad, a rapid application development, drag&drop programming environment written in Japan in Smalltalk at the end of the 1980s. It was something like the contemporary HyperCard and Visual Basic.
Medley Interlisp has the most tightly integrated combination of system software, application platform, programming language, development environment, tools, and runtime platform I've ever experienced.
A rare "whole greater than the sum of its parts" level of synergy mostly seen only on Smalltalk workstations and Lisp Machines.
@amoroso Remember that the initial Interlisp-D and #Smalltalk workstations were essentially the same machines with different microcode, and originally built and used, in fact, in the same building. It's not at all surprising that they share common DNA.
Smalltalk devs have been kicking-ass and taking names in the "creative solutions" department lately coughGlamorous Toolkitcough and yet no-one's made a notable static blog generator to use to talk about their Smalltalk coolness?!
🤯
(i say "notable" because a 2 line README tells me "just a personal project" not something intended for others)
If you're a #ruby geek, and haven't learned smalltalk yet, you should watch it. It's a fun little "hey check out this tiny bit of coolness"
If you're even remotely tempted by #smalltalk know that that's not even scratching the surface. There is SO MUCH AMAZING stuff in smalltalk, both old & new.
Allen Wirfs-Brock's website provides lots of interesting first hand information and material about the history of Smalltalk. For example, his personal account of the development of a "Smalltalk machine", a Tektronix AI workstation running Smalltalk:
Good morning everyone! How is everybody doing today?
Tonight it is supposed to dip down into the sub-zero celsius range again where I live, but I'm sitting at home, trying to caffeinate enough to concentrate on work.
Is caffeinate a word? I get it marked red on here.
「 Kay envisioned a new sort of software environment and programming language for the Dynabook. In this digital world, children and adults alike would be able to create their own tools, models, and simulations; share them and build on one another’s work; and exchange the resulting knowledge. The key to accomplishing all that would be a new approach to coding that came to be known as object-oriented programming」
"Composition is better than Inheritance" is already a cliché, and it's usually even true. Today. But it wasn't always the case. Back in the early days of Object-Oriented Programming, computers were pitifully show, memory was tiny, and OOP languages only worked acceptably because of aggressive optimization in implementation.
Inheritance itself is mostly an optimization. (I don't have room for the explanation here, but buy me a coffee and ask me some time.) In Smalltalk-80, sharing behavior by composition was several orders of magnitude slower than inheritance. With inheritance, there was a VM optimization to make it go as fast as possible. But for composition, you had to do all that work in Smalltalk code, which involved message sends, stack frame allocations, and all the rest. Even then, inheritance felt restrictive, and I spent quite a bit of time writing hacks to enable performant compostion by tricking the Smalltalk object system.
Modern object languages don't have to fit within the same restrictions as earlier efforts, and that changes how we design software. Early Smalltalks only supported 16K objects because object pointers were mapped through a fixed size Object Table. Even when we had enough RAM, we couldn't allocate 20K strings! When the first modern "OT-less" Smalltalk appeared with an unlimited number of objects, it changed everything.
OOP is polymorphism + encapsulation + inheritance by class. Of those three, class inheritance is the least critical and the most replaceable. Now that we can enjoy good performance with other kinds of behavioral composition, we can throw off the itchy wool sweater of class-based inheritance.