Does anyone code Smalltalk any more? | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone code Smalltalk any more?

10 pointskcd11 comments

ezboard, a 1998 startup, used Smalltalk for their bulletin board service. They did really well for awhile but have been declining steadily ever since 2003. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to make money from the sites with heavy traffic. After some unpopular decisions about pricing and advertising, many of their biggest customers decided to host their own boards instead, using solutions like vBulletin or phpBB.

ezboard had several different subscriber levels. The free version caused your board to be so full of popups and other intrusive ads as to be almost unusable. It was worse than Myspace (and Firefox wasn't very popular yet). The first paid level let you turn off the popups but left the banners, including a huge banner at the bottom so that if you hit the "end" key to see the latest comment you'd wind up with a banner in your face and would have to scroll back up to see the comments. The premium level let you turn off all ads, but it was more expensive to do that than simply hosting your own solution.

They still exist, but I haven't really been paying attention. I'm not sure if they still use Smalltalk or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard

One YC-funded startup is using it.

Are they using Seaside or rolling their own framework (I'm assuming they're doing a webapp)?

I got Founders At Work a few days ago and saw that one of the guys (not Paul Graham, I think) used Smalltalk for an early version of their site...

I don't know smalltalk, but got interested lately because of the 100$ laptop, which seems to build on squeak. Also there was some interesting framework for multiuser virtual worlds, I think it might be Croquet (also based on squeak): http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/About_the_Technology

So I would also be curious to know if smalltalk is still worth checking out.

The $100 laptop (also known as the OLPC--One Laptop Per Child project) is not based on Squeak. It's partly based on Linux (the OS), but the stuff users see is largely written in Python. Squeak is on the laptop as one of the things students can use. I think the main reason it was put on there was for its eToys facility, which allows kids to draw objects on the screen and then program them to do things, to create their own simulations. It also has some games that run on it.

It's on there as part of the open source spirit of the system as well. Since Squeak reveals all of its code in Smalltalk, once they learn the language they can explore it and modify it however they like. The same goes for the Python stuff.

Re: Croquet

Yes, Croquet is written on the Squeak VM. It's actually based on a modification to Squeak, called "Tweak".

IMO Smalltalk is worth checking out. I've been doing so. There are different paths you could take with this. The basic level you can explore is the Smalltalk language itself. There are online books on the language you can read. There are some hardcopy books that cover the higher levels of Squeak. There's Morphic, which is the window manager for the Squeak desktop environment. There's eToys, which is a more abstract, but easy to use, scripting environment. Then there's Seaside, which is a web application framework for it. There are no books for this. The best source I've found for it are blogs that focus on Seaside.

Seaside uses some advanced programming constructs to create a programming environment that's unlike most other web frameworks out there. I haven't used it directly yet, but from what I've read about it, it's really nice. If you get into it you probably won't want to go back to what you used before.

DabbleDB is a startup using Smalltalk.

http://dabbledb.com/

I think a better question would be, "Does anyone program in Smalltalk yet?" It seems to be becoming more popular, rather than less. As people begin to get an awareness of more advanced paradigms some of the older research languages begin to look nicer. Smalltalk is OOP done very well. Ruby is actually a lot like it, and may turn out to be a better Smalltalk than Smalltalk (some would say otherwise, of course).

One my friend codes aviation simulators in Smalltalk.

Smalltalk is a really excellent language. Very minimal (yet attractive and understandable syntax), and the use of blocks make very cool things possible.

Ruby is about 75% there. Unfortunately Smalltalk suffers from the same problem Common Lisp does; poor marketing/popularity and so-so implementations (compared to say Python).

A friend of mine is using Squeak to prototype financial applications requiring rich user interfaces. I'm betting coding the same kinds of interfaces in Java or C++ would take a lot longer. It's something to think about when you're trying to get demonstrations ready on time.

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