Dan Ingalls was the principal designer and implementer of #Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is an immensely influential language that pioneered object-oriented programming and its execution model, which relied on a virtual machine, paved the way for modern VMs like the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The portability of the Smalltalk image (bytecode) across different VMs was a key concept adopted by Java.
The August 1981 issue of BYTE magazine was devoted to Smalltalk, featuring an article by Ingalls in which he discussed the principles behind Smalltalk’s design. It turns out that the purpose of the #Smalltalk project was “to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone”.
The full text is available here: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html
Via @unix_byte
A language of description and a language of interaction.
By providing only the first kind of language, basically an implementation like GNU Smalltalk has removed the second beautiful concept.
@chemoelectric What do you think about this Byte's article?
Wellllllll.... Treating this stuff as a great innovation at Palo Alto is excessive. The UCSD p-system was already a famous portable byte code system. And ‘object orientation’ goes back to a famous paper, I can’t remember its name, but I don’t know if it came out of Palo Alto.
I am not familiar with any of the Smalltalk implementations.
I do know that ‘messaging’ is not how any of the popular ‘object-oriented’ languages treat the subject, except perhaps Obj C.
Years ago, for very short period of time, I had ever explored Squeak (or Pharo, forget which one) for fun.
I was amazed that a programming language provides something similar with desktop environment and all things related with the programming language, including the tools are living inside the environment.
At the time, suddenly I remember Lisp Machine, GNU Emacs and Gnustep + Window Maker at the same time.
Although of course I realized these all are different.
@restorante
And Squeak is a smaller download than Emacs. But I never could use #Squeak as marketed. Specifically, I failed to understand how to remove the seconds display from the digital clock widget.
@chemoelectric @toomanysecrets
@tetrislife @restorante There are people who still use Emacs 18, which is a lot smaller than later Emaces.
But even back in the 1980s, when GNU Emacs was new, it was still too big for me to compile it on a 3b2. I had to compile it on a 3b15 and move the binary to the 3b2.