I got into professional software development in the early 2000s. At the time Java and .NET were kings. Ive since learned that Smalltalk was a serious contender in the 90s. My question is, what happened?
Was there something about the Smalltalk language or runtime that made it a poor choice for business software, or did Sun and Microsoft just have better marketing?
I used to own a stack of boxes of vintage Byte magazine issues from 78-82 as I wanted physical copies of the #smalltalk and #lisp articles (which at the time were not scanned/available). Anyway I couldn’t help but read almost all of them, mainly for the ads! Also some great #forth articles. Ultimately it was incredibly informative to learn about the hype cycle of tech. So every time I hear about crypto or LLM shit I imagine it (well what ever the aphantasia version of imagining is) in terms of half page glossy over produced vintage byte magazine ads.
I have hacked the source to add an indirection table that all object references go through. The indirection contains a pointer and a bank number. "dereferencing" an indirection maps the corresponding bank.
The loading of the initial images goes through, and I can execute 3 bytecode opcodes before it crashes! But this is really a tight fit in the rom, and I quickly ran out of space after adding some debug traces.
#Smalltalk for #AmstradCPC is alive! Well, sort of. The virtual machine is running now, but my choice of memory organization with an indirection page turns out not to be a very good one, as the indirection table quickly fills up because many small objects are created.
Maybe the next step is implementing chars similar to smallints, that is, inlined in other objects. But that will save me only 256 entries in the table, out of 5000.
⚡ Building a Real Time OS Kernel in Smalltalk
➥ Tim Rowledge
「 The team at Interval Research was given the task of making an entire OS for a media handling server/network controller where it would be 'Smalltalk all the way down'. Aside from a tiny library of context switching routines and machine startup procedures, the aim was to make it possible to write everything in Smalltalk; all the way up from device drivers to user applications 」
Many people dread small talk (not us, now tell us about your vacation plans). Human connectivity researcher Georgie Nightingall says it can be a way of building deeper connection, trust and curiosity. “You can actually realize that you do want to know more rather than having that sense of like, I’m just asking for the sake of asking,” she told Vox. Here are some tips on how to improve your small talk abilities. We want to know, how do you feel about the art of chitchat?
I still keep the manual of Smalltalk/V DOS by Digitalk for MS-DOS, which I used back in the early 1990s on a 386 laptop. But, sadly, I no longer have the product box and the 3.5" disk with the software.
started looking into squeak/smalltalk and it's just amazing!
there's this tool called method finder which let's you type in arguments and what you expect them to produce and it lists you all possible methods that could have produced the result. #smalltalk#squeak
This is a little proof of concept that I put together VERY quickly.
The problem I had was that I LOVE going to the movies, and how that we have a theater in town, I love it even more. Unfortunately, I miss movies all the time as you really have to work hard to get the show times. It would be GREAT if I could get a listing emailed or texted to me every few days (or something changes).
@draft13 In my opinion, as a long-time #smalltalk programmer and fan, it's still one of the most productive environments. #pharo continues to innovate, and #GlamorousToolkit pushes the envelope even further.
Learning any new programming language is a chance to see things differently. Learn Smalltalk and you may never look back.