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I've been reading about Smalltalk and Squeak for years and only just now realized the relationship between their names. Anyway... My only real exposure to Smal

by dilap 6y ago

I've been reading about Smalltalk and Squeak for years and only just now realized the relationship between their names. Anyway... My only real exposure to Smalltalk was via obj-c. That combination of simple languages was truly amazing in terms of its power/complexity ratio. I'm not doing native iOS dev anymore, but from a distance, it's a little sad for me to see how much of radical departure Swift is from that simplicity...

galaxyLogic 6y ago
I wonder if the name Smalltalk was inspired by the name "Lisp". Lisp is away of talking, so is small talk. Maybe creators of ST-80 desired to create something higher level, more human-like than "lisp".
- pjmlp 6y ago
  If you dive into the history of Xerox PARC workstations, you will find similar developer experiences for Lisp (Interlisp-D), Mesa (XDE) and Mesa/Cedar. The graphical debugger, dynamic code loading, bytecodes with microcoded CPU configured on boot, REPL with access to the whole OS, the way OS, libraries and applications blend together, all there across all those language stacks.
- joubert 6y ago
  Lisp stands for “list processor”.
- dpraburaj 6y ago
  Doesn't look like it although Alan Kay has expressed admiration for Lisp in many places. > As for hype: Another motive for "smalltalk" was the practice at the time of naming operating, and other, systems (which hardly did anything) after mighty indo-european gods, such as Thor, Zeus, Odin, etc. I figured that if Smalltalk ever did something neat, then people would be pleasantly surprised. http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50.
- gjvc 6y ago
  This really is a potentially very misleading bit of uninformed speculation. "LISP" gets its name from "list processor". "Smalltalk" gets its name from the the fact that the language came from the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC -- the "small" was thus meant as an acknowledgement of the study that how children learn was crucial to the design of the Smalltalk system, and the "talk" relates to the fact that objects "talk" to one other by messaging.
  - canadian_tired 6y ago
    LISP: We were told Lots (of) Insignificant Stupid Parentheses.
hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
I didn’t notice that either.

by dilap 6y ago

galaxyLogic 6y ago

I wonder if the name Smalltalk was inspired by the name "Lisp". Lisp is away of talking, so is small talk. Maybe creators of ST-80 desired to create something higher level, more human-like than "lisp".

pjmlp 6y ago
If you dive into the history of Xerox PARC workstations, you will find similar developer experiences for Lisp (Interlisp-D), Mesa (XDE) and Mesa/Cedar. The graphical debugger, dynamic code loading, bytecodes with microcoded CPU configured on boot, REPL with access to the whole OS, the way OS, libraries and applications blend together, all there across all those language stacks.
joubert 6y ago
Lisp stands for “list processor”.
dpraburaj 6y ago
Doesn't look like it although Alan Kay has expressed admiration for Lisp in many places. > As for hype: Another motive for "smalltalk" was the practice at the time of naming operating, and other, systems (which hardly did anything) after mighty indo-european gods, such as Thor, Zeus, Odin, etc. I figured that if Smalltalk ever did something neat, then people would be pleasantly surprised. http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50.
gjvc 6y ago
This really is a potentially very misleading bit of uninformed speculation. "LISP" gets its name from "list processor". "Smalltalk" gets its name from the the fact that the language came from the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC -- the "small" was thus meant as an acknowledgement of the study that how children learn was crucial to the design of the Smalltalk system, and the "talk" relates to the fact that objects "talk" to one other by messaging.
- canadian_tired 6y ago
  LISP: We were told Lots (of) Insignificant Stupid Parentheses.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago

I didn’t notice that either.