Trevor Burnham

I was under the impres­sion that these days, you’re more likely to find Smalltalk in the History depart­ment than the Computer Science depart­ment. That is, until:

• I read a great inter­view with Dan Ingalls, the “mother of Smalltalk” (Alan Kay is the father) in the excel­lent Coders at Work, in which he dis­cusses all the neat, fun things he’s been doing with the language lately, like Lively Kernel, a browser-​​based pro­gram­ming learning envi­ron­ment, and Squeak, which powers the One Laptop Per Child laptops, among other things.
• I learned that Smalltalk powers DabbleDB. DabbleDB is a cool site that hosts spread­sheets in a much more web-​​like way than services like Google Spread­sheets, which are just trying to ape Excel in the browser (just as Excel aped Lotus 1–2-3, and Lotus 1–2-3 aped VisiCalc…).
• All the other geeks inter­viewed in Coders at Work and Mas­ter­minds of Pro­gram­ming seem to like Smalltalk. C and its descen­dants (C++, Java…) get a lot of bashing, but Smalltalk is typ­i­cally treated with unadul­ter­ated admi­ra­tion. If lan­guages were on Rotten Tomatoes, Smalltalk would be 92% fresh.

I don’t think Smalltalk is going to make a Big Comeback (newer lan­guages like Scala are just too cool), but it’s def­i­nitely going to stick around for a while. And unlike the sticky, mal­odor­ous remnants of COBOL, I have no objec­tion to the clean, classic scent of Smalltalk.

Tags:   codingNo Comments