[HN Gopher] Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical...
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Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk
written in itself [pdf] (1997)
Author : fanf2
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-12-24 21:42 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vpri.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vpri.org)
| conartist6 wrote:
| It's really cool how much of this feels familiar to me from my
| own experience building and evolving bootstrapped systems
| gnabgib wrote:
| (1997)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's really a shame that the early history of Smalltalk-80 was
| such that it remained too locked up in licensing and $$
| implementations and so didn't get a broader penetration. That and
| it was about a generation or two ahead of the extant
| microcomputing hardware at the time, so wasn't going to be
| shippable in a performant way on a general consumer class machine
| even by the time the Lisa and Mac shipped in the mid-80s.
|
| I was very excited by Squeak in the late 90s (and even more
| excited by Self), but it was clear that the time of Smalltalk
| being able to make any kind of broader splash was done, and Java
| was where people's attention switched.
|
| Imagine if a consumer focused machine like the Macintosh had
| shipped, but based fully on Smalltalk, with an authoring
| environment built on it for "regular people". The closest we got
| to this was Hypercard.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| the whole Smalltalk saga is a bit of a tragedy looking back
| (EDIT: as someone who didn't live through that era) through the
| context of the current state of consumer computing being so
| "non-convivial", if I can borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich.
| Empowering users by allowing them to conform the tools to their
| own usecase often feels like the exact opposite paradigm of the
| modern milieu.
|
| Or maybe I'm just entering my "old man yells at cloud" phase of
| life haha
| igouy wrote:
| Saga: https://web.archive.org/web/20130612055149/http://www.m
| ojowi...
| mwnorman2 wrote:
| Well, I DID live through that era and I AM the 'old-man-
| yelling-at-clouds' ;-) and the main issue was that getting
| Smalltalk developers was a HUGE headache. I worked for a
| Telecom company (Canada's largest, rhymes with 'Ortel') and
| we needed to develop our own courses - yours truly developed
| and delivered dozens of hours of training.
|
| This lead to some extraordinary per-diem charges that I knew
| some folks enjoyed for a while, mostly paid for by the
| Financial industry. Eventually those on the paying side
| looked for cheaper alternatives .. and yes, the new-kid-on-
| the-block Java played a big role, but so did Visual Basic!
| igouy wrote:
| 'We read and heard many stories about confident and
| experienced programmers plunging into self-study tutorials,
| only to give up in frustration after several hours, still
| wondering, "Where is the application code?" The object
| paradigm, in which program control is distributed across a
| set of tightly encapsulated and high-function software
| objects, was alien to experts in procedural design.
|
| ... to use Smalltalk fluently, a programmer must become
| familiar with a huge class hierarchy and with the tools of
| a sophisticated interactive programming environment. New
| programmers often became lost in the hierarchy or spent
| considerable time in unfocused exploration of the
| interactive tools.'
|
| "Making Use: scenario-based design of human-computer
| interactions", 2000, page 103
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Making_Use/s-0ZuadhBBA
| C...
| em-bee wrote:
| doesn't sound much different than studying the class
| library of any other language.
| igouy wrote:
| _The past is a foreign country ..._
| shaunxcode wrote:
| It's comforting to remember that a lot of the research from
| st/self eg hotspot went into the jvm. So whenever I am writing
| clojure I feel I am still, in a way, hanging out with all of my
| (lang) friends.
| igouy wrote:
| March 7, 1988 -- "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs
| $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's
| Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...
| Qem wrote:
| Inflation-adjusted, those prices today would correspond to
| ~$552.2 and ~$207.6
| igouy wrote:
| Look at other 1988 prices for dev tools.
| whartung wrote:
| I bought that. (We just don't discuss how much money was
| spent in the 80's and 90's on hardware, books, software,
| etc.) I had to drive from the So Cal South Bay up to Sherman
| Oaks to find a store on Ventura Blvd that had it. It was
| pretty cool at the time, but, it didn't have very good
| documentation on getting "your first app" up, so it mostly
| just sat and lingered.
|
| There was a lot of reliance on the Smalltalk books. While the
| blue book was common, the green (history) and orange (how the
| GUI works) were not. I don't even recall stumbling across
| those at OpAmp back in the day (and if anyone would have had
| those, they would have). I was very excited about ST back in
| the day.
|
| All of my forays into ST ended up being a struggle and I
| never got any real momentum to make progress.
| igouy wrote:
| Disks and manual were mailed across the pond.
|
| > but, it didn't have very good documentation on getting
| "your first app" up
|
| I thought the "Smalltalk/V 286 Tutorial and Programming
| Handbook" [0] was OK for that. (I hadn't seen the ParcPlace
| books back then.)
|
| [0] http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTut
| orial...
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was perfectly accessible on Windows 3.x days, I learnt
| Smalltalk with Smalltalk/V.
|
| It was the .NET of OS/2 and getting into enterprise, until Java
| came to be, and IBM one of the big Smalltalk backers, decided
| to pivot into Java.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I developed a (personal) Squeak application a few decades ago and
| to this day it stands out as a novel software development
| experience that I'm very glad I did. I highly recommend everyone
| even remotely interested in Smalltalk read the classic "Design
| Principles Behind Smalltalk" [0]
|
| Perhaps the most immediately shocking feature of Squeak is the
| "world" which relates to the principle:
|
| > Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things
| that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.
|
| This means all Squeak programs live in their own, entirely Squeak
| based, virtual machine. This was, understandably, off putting to
| many devs since you can't bring any of your local tooling with
| you, but it had some interesting consequences. For starters, way
| back in the early 2000s, you could keep your Squeak image on a
| thumb drive and bring your entire dev environment with you to not
| only different computers, but different OSes! Then, in the Squeak
| window system, you could _view the source_ of any arbitrary
| window or part of the gui.
|
| Squeak, despite the small community, had some really novel
| software at the time. Monticello was a dvcs that _predated_ git!
| There were also a proper object graph database, GemStone, that
| could be used for object persistence that, at least from an
| interface level, still beats any ORM we have today. There was
| also a feature that allowed method lookup by putting in the
| inputs and expected outputs (I still haven 't seen anything like
| this).
|
| In general learning about the history of Smalltalk interactively
| really drove home how incredibly novel of a system is was, and
| still remains in some ways today.
|
| 0.
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....
| hosh wrote:
| I am very interested in the combination of Smalltalk and local-
| first (offline-first) designs, and the ability to share code
| and data on ad-hoc networks.
|
| I know the One Laptop Per Child project started with Squeak
| (Scratch) with this in mind, but Scratch has since moved to an
| always-on Internet and Python for the environment.
|
| I know there is a preoccupation on LLMs and vibe coding ... but
| just as there is a smallweb movement keeping that torch lit in
| a sea of enshittification, there is something to be said about
| a development environment that can be customized by end users.
| For example, a website/blog authoring tool or RSS feed reader
| written in Smalltalk would be interesting, if not directly
| monetizable.
| igouy wrote:
| > Squeak, despite the small community ...
|
| _fwiw_ GemStone (and other _commercial_ Smalltalk
| implementations) preceded Squeak.
| verytrivial wrote:
| Not quibbling at all, but I recall some discussion somewhere
| saying that the history of the Squeak impl itself (not the
| name) traces back via saved base images to the original
| Smalltalk implementations, including via customs at-rest
| transformation tools when backwards incompatible changed
| where made in the primordial days. Base images, at least back
| when I was toying with Squeak, where never rebuilt from
| scratch, just modified, transformed etc. In some sense, at
| least for the image, they were decades old.
| igouy wrote:
| I've never _implemented_ Squeak or any other Smalltalk.
| znpy wrote:
| > > Operating System: An operating system is a collection of
| things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.
|
| Squeak/Pharo and Smalltalk in general never took off (and it's
| unlikely they ever will) because of this mindset.
|
| I dabbled a bit with pharo and this mindset became evident
| pretty much immediately.
|
| The thing is: for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty
| runtimes (think smp/threading, high-throughput or low-latency
| i/o, network protocols support etc). But the OS is generally
| great in that sense.
|
| Smalltalk is nice but it will never get past the "toy language"
| phase with that attitude.
|
| Also: in terms of object database Versant OODBMS is much better
| :P
| pjmlp wrote:
| Smalltalk was taking off, before Java came to be.
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(page generated 2025-12-31 23:00 UTC)