Talk:Smalltalk

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Contents

[edit] Old comments

Removed the following hilited sections because they're not really approporiate:

Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed with great love and foresight at Xerox PARC, the birth place of many good things, by Adele Goldberg?, Dan Ingalls?, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler? and others during the 1970s.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Dachshund (talk • contribs) 21:55, 15 September 2002

Did Adele Goldberg actually help design Smalltalk, or just write the books? This page mentions lots of things she's done, but when it comes to Smalltalk, it just says, "Solely and with others, Adele wrote the definitive books on the Smalltalk-80 programming system". -- Oliver P. 02:30 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Adele collaborated directly with the group from an early stage, so that would seem to count as helping design the language. Sorry I don't have a reference handy. -Lex (lex@cc.gatech.edu) 31 Oct 2004

[1] "Along with Alan Kay, Dr. Goldberg developed Smalltalk and wrote much of the documentation. " --Blouis79 13:33, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

SMALLTALK (1987) Citation Adele Goldberg, Daniel H.H. INgalls, Jr., Alan C. Kay

For seminal contributions to object0oriented programming languages and related programming techniques. The theories of languages and development systems known as "Smalltalk" laid the foundation for explorations in new software methodologies, graphical user interface designs, and forms of on-line assistance to the software development process.[2] --Blouis79 13:37, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

"widely believed" to be such a great language? By whom? I am a programmer and heavily involved in open-source development, and I have barely even heard of it, let alone believe it to be great. Jeeves 18:42, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The fact that somebody has not heard of a language does not prove that it is not a great language. You can learn more about it at: WhySmalltalk. BTW, one of the early pioneers of Wiki technology is a Smalltalker i.e. Ward Cunningham. My final comments is that not only is Smalltalk a great language because of what it can currently do but also because of what it has inspired to do. -Charles

Similar things could be said about any language, by its fans. Remove. Fredrik 18:45, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Removed "In spite of its 20-year history, it is widely believed that the overall programming experience and productivity of Smalltalk is still unsurpassed by other development environments." Fredrik 19:05, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The overall programming experience is a big deal for Smalltalk, though. It and the Lisp Machine are the exemplars for what might be called the "dynamic programming style" where you edit live programs and where the code is available for everything you see. Dropping the value judgement is fine, but someone with more time than me should try to write something about the dynamic programming style. Smalltalk isn't just a language. -Lex (lex@cc.gatech.edu) 31 Oct 2004
Alan Kay won the A.M. Turing Award (2003) because of Smalltalk.So isn't it a great language? -Kamishiro Maiku 13:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)


The "Hello world" example is hardly illustrative. - Furrykef 14:37, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I fleshed it out using what I know from Squeak. Is the Transcript object Squeak-specific? - Furrykef 11:36, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Transcript is available in most Smalltalks. I think "Transcript show: 'hello, world'" is actually an excellent way to show how message sending works and how Smalltalk's syntax looks. I've updated the "hello, world" example to talk about this. -Lex (lex@cc.gatech.edu), 31 Oct 2004

Lex, the "Hello world" example does hardly reflect the nature of Smalltalk. In Smalltalk-80 and Squeak, use

'Hello, World!' asParagraph displayOn: Display at: Sensor waitButton
This expression is useful for doIt, for printIt and for inspectIt and exhibits the interplay of text, the Display and the Sensor. Many illuminating facets of #asParagraph, #displayOn:at: and #waitButton could be shown to the curious. -kwl (people.squeakfoundation.org/person/kwl/), 8 Nov 2006

IBM is dumping Smalltalk? Are you sure? Please provide a reference on the page if so. IBM is normally quite good at supporting products that its customers are using. That's a selling point of both IBM and Smalltalk: they've been around, and will continue to be around. Smalltalk is not massively popular in industry, but let's not get carried away -- it gets SOME industry use. -Lex (lex@cc.gatech.edu) 31 Oct 2004

[edit] External links

Why are there links to spanish sites in the english wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.224.200.137 (talk • contribs) 20:40, 14 January 2007

[edit] Code in ANSI Smalltalk?

Probably better for the smalltalk code section to reference ANSI Smalltalk rather than Smalltalk-80 --Blouis79 13:31, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A more detailed genealogy

From Methods and Smalltalk-V to current VisualWorks and from ST-80 to Squeak would make a nice section of its own. Also an impact section discussing C++, Ruby, etc. would be useful. Lycurgus 05:24, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lead section

I feel like the first quote is too long... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.215.170.216 (talk • contribs) 20:28, 1 July 2007

I agree. These quotations may be informative, but they need to be in a context where the user will understand them; in my opinion the lead section, where no context has been established yet, is far too early. They just clutter it up. I've removed them. Hairy Dude 20:26, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Influences section

I propose an Influences section. I wrote a skeleton of it, carved out from the History section. Four key influences are well documented, so I introduced them. The examples given so far relate only to syntax and semantics, but I don't have time to write about the other 3 influences: object-oriented message passing (Objective-C among many others), GUIs, and IDEs (such as Visual C++ and Eclipse). Therefore I have left an {{expand-section}} tag, as this would be an interesting short project for anyone that wishes to work on improving the article. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hello world?

The hello world section has a link to the 'main' hello world article? related yes, but this is not a section that talks about hello world, it is one example of it. Maybe have see also, Hello World, but not main article. Just my 2c 220.233.27.104 12:31, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image-based persistence

See my remarks in Talk:Lisp (programming language)#Missing Stuff regarding the issue of whether Lisp uses the same image-persistence thing that Smalltalk does. I've not used Smalltalk, but from the description given here, I'm not sure that's a model used a whole lot by Lisp. There is such a technique available for application deployment, but it's rarely used for development in the way that, for example, MOO does. Assuming anyone even agrees with me on this, and to avoid removing a cross-reference that I think is an interesting one to leave in place, would it suffice to say that Lisp has the capability but that it's more often just used for application deployment rather than for persisting development state? --Netsettler 07:36, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Btw, regardless, shouldn't MOO be cross-referenced here? I'm not a Smalltalk user, so I'm timid about making that correction myself. But I assume someone with a connection to PARC must know both languages and be able to assess whether that's appropriate. --Netsettler 07:36, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History section

I don't understand the "except variables" mention in the third paragraph. In Smalltalk, everything, including variables, is an object. This remark needs to be explained, or removed.

OldManLink (talk) 00:15, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Level of Access

"Even the statement true become: false is valid in Smalltalk, although executing it is not recommended."

What does this statement do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.89.247.164 (talk) 05:08, 14 May 2008 (UTC)