The Story of Squeak, a Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself (1997)

This is lovely, we use Cuis University in the UNQ (and I know that it's used in the UBA as well), an argentinian university to teach OOP, and it's amazing how easy is to transmit the ideas. But also smalltalk in general is great to understand the full stack of a language, from the VM to the trivial libraries, including the GUI; and all using that powerful debugger!

Cuis is a fork of Squeak, like Pharo, but simpler. Check it out https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev https://sites.google.com/view/cuis-university

I downloaded Squeak and played around with it for a few weeks last year. Worked perfectly out of the box.[0] It's very cool! The closest we can get to seeing the original Smalltalk environment in action... I felt like I grokked OOP for the first time; this is super-OOP. I love the windowing and windows menus, a cloud of icons around the window. And absolutely everything can be easily customized. A lot of things about the environment seem unique, and mostly the things that are familiar (like the column view of directories & objects) apparently were invented at Xerox PARC! It's very inspiring seeing how things can be done differently. I highly recommend the experience.

[0] When I got into Lisp a couple of years ago, most of the few weeks playing around with Common Lisp was trying to get it to work.. Downloaded 5 versions of Emacs trying to find one that worked with Slime and Clisp (since everyone recommended using it like that) and getting the Emacs init file right and.. what a nightmare.

An ancestor to Pharo. Which, sorry for the recurrent linkage, has a pretty obligatory MOOC https://mooc.pharo.org/

Nice references:

- Animorphic Systems, best known for HotSpot JVM {

-- David Griswold,

-- Gilad Bracha (Newspeak, Dart),

-- Urs Hölzle (Google Data Center)

-- Robert Griesemer (golang)

-- Lars Bak (V8,Dart)

-- Steffen Grarup (uber)

-- Srdjan Mitrovic

}

- David Ungar (Self lang)

- Craig Chambers (Celcil, Diesel lang)

- L. Peter Deutsch (ghostscript)

- ...

Squeak was, I think, the first programming environment I ever used. I spent so many hours making race tracks (2d self driving cars!) and other fun toys, moved on to other stuff soon after that but never really found that feeling of instant feedback again.

There was a sophomore class at Georgia Tech in the early 2000s (and maybe still going, not sure) where we all had to use Squeak. Theres some beauty to the language and its a very good way to learn about message passing.

At the time though, the full environment was incredibly buggy and would lead to having to take image snapshots way more regularly than you'd want to. Hopefully those bugs have been fixed by now if there are still people using it.

Can we add a date? This is about Squeak and feels like it's 20 years old.

Squeak was the inspiration for Newsqueak by Rob Pike, co-author of Golang. A lot of the concurrency ideas can be traced to this timeline, some fascinating stuff there. Check out this video by Pike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo.