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Byte Magazine had the best covers. Page 98 has a fascinating Larry Tessler discussion of Smalltalk that includes a version of his "no modes" rant that later be

Byte Magazine had the best covers. Page 98 has a fascinating Larry Tessler discussion of Smalltalk that includes a version of his "no modes" rant that later became the foundation of the Macintosh UX. It's fascinating to read in retrospect... he calls out Alan Kay's overlapping windows as de facto modes. (I'm trying to image a past where overlapping windows lost and tiled windows and virtual screens won.) But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. Would be terrible for security... but I want it.

jhbadger 7y ago
Plenty of text editors today allow this -- Emacs has "shell command on region" which many modes incorporate to allow running code fragments while editing. I'm not really seeing the security issue given that the code runs as you and can't do anything more than what you could do on the command line.
arnsholt 7y ago
Somewhat to the side of your comment about "do it", but my experience of working in Smalltalk is that it's amazing. The project I was working on had been in production sine 1996, and the Smalltalk VM it ran on dated to 1999 (Cincom bought VSE, license cost things happened), but the way Smalltalk lets you seamlessly move between writing code and exploring the state of a running system made the development process much smoother than any other system I've worked in. Also, the way (almost) everything in the VM can be extended or replaced was very useful in the context of very much legacy code in that project; there's a bug in the standard library? No problem, just patch the offending method(s) and ship the fix in the next release of the software.
coldtea 7y ago
>But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. Would be terrible for security... but I want it. How would it "terrible for security"? It can be done in most text editors like Vim, Sublime, etc, it's just a menu command / shortcut away.
- twic 7y ago
  I think the idea is that end users would be able to do this in the running application, because the running application is just another Smalltalk image.
hhs 7y ago
Agree about the covers. Also, as I'm flipping through the pages, I notice that the advertising copy is quite engaging. I wonder why today's typical paper magazine lacks that playfulness.
- protomyth 7y ago
  The ads were done by a lot of folks without an advertising background, and basically said what would attract them. I miss the lack of slickness, but I guess that only works in a hobbyist / early market.
e12e 7y ago
I used to think that too. Then I accidentally hit ctrl-shift-c in outlook webmail/chrome - opening the dev console rather than copying the highlighted text... Point being smalltalk did "win" in the end (or: so far).
isr 7y ago
> But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. Would be terrible for security... but I want it. I don't see it as a security problem - just as accidentally headbutting your keyboard and spitting out "sudo rm -rf /" maybe a "security problem" in theory (to some), but not in practice! Anyway, what you're looking for is the acme editor. Some great guides available online (the obligatory introduction is Russ Cox's video). Ostensibly, its the "emacs for plan9", but has long since been available on other platforms, courtesy of plan9port (which makes much of the plan9 userspace available natively on unixy machines). Acme has heavily inspired by the oberon (a full language-as-OS system, akin to lisp machines and what not) editing environment, and somewhat influenced by smalltalk (Rob Pike spent some early time at the Xerox Parc Labs playing with it). It has the "text anywhere is executable (or searchable/plumbable/etc), if you want to" feature as a core concept. If anyone is interested, along with a host of acme-like clones, there's a quite usable fork called [acme2k](https://github.com/karahobny/acme2k https://github.com/karahobny/acme2k) which gives you a few additional keyboard shortcuts, plus the ability to apply your own colourscheme by editing a header file and recompiling (a la suckless and dwm).
vram22 7y ago
>But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. I vaguely remember reading (in an old BYTE issue, ha ha) that the Oberon operating system had something like this.

jhbadger 7y ago

Plenty of text editors today allow this -- Emacs has "shell command on region" which many modes incorporate to allow running code fragments while editing. I'm not really seeing the security issue given that the code runs as you and can't do anything more than what you could do on the command line.

arnsholt 7y ago

Somewhat to the side of your comment about "do it", but my experience of working in Smalltalk is that it's amazing. The project I was working on had been in production sine 1996, and the Smalltalk VM it ran on dated to 1999 (Cincom bought VSE, license cost things happened), but the way Smalltalk lets you seamlessly move between writing code and exploring the state of a running system made the development process much smoother than any other system I've worked in. Also, the way (almost) everything in the VM can be extended or replaced was very useful in the context of very much legacy code in that project; there's a bug in the standard library? No problem, just patch the offending method(s) and ship the fix in the next release of the software.

coldtea 7y ago

>But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. Would be terrible for security... but I want it. How would it "terrible for security"? It can be done in most text editors like Vim, Sublime, etc, it's just a menu command / shortcut away.

twic 7y ago
I think the idea is that end users would be able to do this in the running application, because the running application is just another Smalltalk image.

hhs 7y ago

Agree about the covers. Also, as I'm flipping through the pages, I notice that the advertising copy is quite engaging. I wonder why today's typical paper magazine lacks that playfulness.

protomyth 7y ago
The ads were done by a lot of folks without an advertising background, and basically said what would attract them. I miss the lack of slickness, but I guess that only works in a hobbyist / early market.

e12e 7y ago

I used to think that too. Then I accidentally hit ctrl-shift-c in outlook webmail/chrome - opening the dev console rather than copying the highlighted text... Point being smalltalk did "win" in the end (or: so far).

isr 7y ago

> But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. Would be terrible for security... but I want it. I don't see it as a security problem - just as accidentally headbutting your keyboard and spitting out "sudo rm -rf /" maybe a "security problem" in theory (to some), but not in practice! Anyway, what you're looking for is the acme editor. Some great guides available online (the obligatory introduction is Russ Cox's video). Ostensibly, its the "emacs for plan9", but has long since been available on other platforms, courtesy of plan9port (which makes much of the plan9 userspace available natively on unixy machines). Acme has heavily inspired by the oberon (a full language-as-OS system, akin to lisp machines and what not) editing environment, and somewhat influenced by smalltalk (Rob Pike spent some early time at the Xerox Parc Labs playing with it). It has the "text anywhere is executable (or searchable/plumbable/etc), if you want to" feature as a core concept. If anyone is interested, along with a host of acme-like clones, there's a quite usable fork called [acme2k](https://github.com/karahobny/acme2k https://github.com/karahobny/acme2k) which gives you a few additional keyboard shortcuts, plus the ability to apply your own colourscheme by editing a header file and recompiling (a la suckless and dwm).

vram22 7y ago

>But the thing I like the most is the ability to write some code in the text editor, highlight it, and use the "do it" menu command to immediately execute it. I vaguely remember reading (in an old BYTE issue, ha ha) that the Oberon operating system had something like this.