At 10:03 AM 5/18/2006, SmallSqueak wrote: --snip--
I have a feeling that to many Smalltakers, in general, there have been no advances in software engineering and computer language design since Smalltalk was invented. When was Smalltalk really invented?
The idea of objects as message sending computers came to me in Nov 66. I did several OOP languages between then and 1970.
Was it in 1972 or 1976 or 1980?
My original plan for Smalltalk was to make a Logo-like language that combined objects with Carl Hewitt's PLANNER (a pattern directed language that anticipated most abilities of Prolog by many years) and Ned Irons IMP (another pattern directed language but aimed at extension by end-users). This design is now called Smalltalk-71.
I was working on this when the hallway "bet" with Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler happened in Sept 1972. I worked for several weeks to write a less than one page McCarthy-like eval for an OOP language that could parse its own messages. Dan implemented this in Oct 1972, and all of a sudden we had a working system, which was put right on the Alto when it started working a few months later.
Did Squeak Central insist on creating things that are worse than Smalltalk-72 and the crowd assumed that it is automatically better than something "old" like Smalltalk-72?
Not really. Smalltalk-76 in many ways was the best compromise between the need for speed and a number of the good features of Smalltalk-72. The process after Smalltalk-72 was very conditioned by adult programmers making a system for more for themselves than having children be able to use it as a top priority.
For that matter, did the commercial Smalltalk vendors insist likewise?
The big problem is that most programmers have a very hard time thinking about facilitating programming for people who are not like them, and they also have a very hard time understanding media.
Cheers,
Alan
Cheers, PhiHo----- Original Message ----- From: "Jecel Assumpcao Jr" jecel@merlintec.com To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 2:44 PM Subject: YASoB (was Re: some news)
PhiHo,
"Alan Kay" wrote:
"... it really bothers me that so many people on this list are satisfied with Smalltalk-80 (Yikes!) But that's another soapbox."
Dear Seasoned Squeakers,
I have followed this list for a while and I have a feeling that Alan Kay is not particularly fond of Smalltalk-80.
I've been wondering why or maybe I got it wrong.
Your thought is very much appreciated.
I really hope if Alan is not too busy we will be able to hear it straight from the Dragon's mouth. ;-)
Rather than speaking for Alan, I will just quote two paragraphs from his "Early History of Smalltalk" (there is a link to a PDF version in Stef's Free Books page and there is a html version with some missing pictures at http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html):
I will try to show where most of the influences came from and how they were transformed in the magnetic field formed by the new personal computing metaphor. It was the attitudes as well as the great ideas of the pioneers that helped Smalltalk get invented. Many of the people I admired most at this time--such as Ivan Sutherland, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Gordon Moore, Bob Barton, Dave Evans, Butler Lampson, Jerome Bruner, and others--seemed to have a splendid sense that their creations, though wonderful by relative standards, were not near to the absolute thresholds that had to be crossed. Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the mountain. Where Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, computer scientists all too often stand on each other's toes. Myopia is still a problem where there are giants' shoulders to stand on--"outsight" is better than insight--but it can be minimized by using glasses whose lenses are highly sensitive to esthetics and criticism.
and
New ideas go through stages of acceptance, both from within and without.
From within, the sequence moves from "barely seeing" a pattern several
times, then noting it but not perceiving its "cosmic" significance, then using it operationally in several areas, then comes a "grand rotation" in which the pattern becomes the center of a new way of thinking, and finally, it turns into the same kind of inflexible religion that it originally broke away from. From without, as Schopenhauer noted, the new idea is first denounced as the work of the insane, in a few years it is considered obvious and mundane, and finally the original denouncers will claim to have invented it.
My comment on this is that Smalltalk-80 was indeed wonderful by relative standards, but it shouldn't become a religion that keeps us from inventing something better. Though this isn't nearly as sad as people who keep insisting on creating things that are worse while the public assumes it is automatically better than something "old" like Smalltalk (what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery").
--Jecel