On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 04:22:52PM -0800, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:

A holiday present from the past! I digitized a video tape that VPRI has and uploaded: http://youtu.be/4ki2AQvneD8

Hope you enjoy it!

Thank you Yoshiki!

And happy holidays to all.

Dave

On 25.12.2014 01:22, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:

A holiday present from the past! I digitized a video tape that VPRI has and uploaded: http://youtu.be/4ki2AQvneD8

Hope you enjoy it!

Dear Dan, Thank you for taking the trouble to record the history of Smalltalk history; I think it is both interesting and important to understand how the Smalltalk technology evolved.

I hear you refer to Smalltalk as a programming language. Most of the programmers I know will misunderstand this. To them, a program is a text written in a programming language. The text is the Real Thing, the executable is derived.

Contrast with Alan's definition of object orientation: Objects are like computers communicating through a very fast network. With Smalltalk, communication became a first class citizen of computing. The Real Thing is now a universe of communicating objects. Objects are mustered on the fly to perform a task. There is no "Smalltalk Language" in the common sense of the word. It is true that Smalltalk releases have a default language for compiling methods within a class. The compiler is private to the class; other classes may use different compilers and, therefore, different languages. For example, VisualWorks had a class where the methods were written in SQL.

My main objection to calling Smalltalk a programing language is that it belittles its importance. IMO, Alan's concept of object orientation that is reified in Smalltalk is the the most important software invention since the first programming languages in the 1950s. It heralds an entirely new way of thinking about computing by replacing the underlying digital computer with a universe of communicating entities. I call it an /object computer/. (I see signs of this idea cropping up in other contexts as for example in "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628").

We are only scratching the surface of the object computer's capabilities. I hope we in the coming years will deepen our understanding of what this invention entails and create powerful ways to exploit it. Squeak and its derivatives give us a flying start.

I wish you all a productive and Happy New Year --Trygve