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A Little Smalltalk (1987)

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69 pointstodsacerdoti15 comments

Kind of wild to see interest in Smalltalk again. I moved on from the language back in the 90s after being a SmallTalk/V and ParcPlace developer for a couple decades. Don't take this as a critique of your interest in Smalltalk. It is an awesome little language that's slowly been getting better for larger projects over the last decade. I would encourage you to look at Self, but coaxing the most recent version to run on modern computers is a difficult and undocumented task. Lively Kernel is also interesting, sort of like Self meets JavaScript meets SVG. Worth checking out if you like Smalltalk: https://lively-kernel.org/

Self was great in multiple ways, and worth reading up on and playing with.

Looks like distributions are at: https://selflanguage.org/ and repo at: https://github.com/russellallen/self

Java and many other languages (JIT), Squeak (morphs worlds), and JavaScript (class-less prototype object system), later got some of the Self magic. But I think Self was where I first used all of those.

NewtonSript, the native language of Apple's Newton devices, was also heavily influenced by Self.

See http://newtonscript.org/ for doc, examples, etc.

Great book for learning OOP and how to implement a bytecode compiler and interpreter for a small language. One of my favorite books.

A few years later Budd worked on a successor where the compiler and much of the system was written in Smalltalk and image-based. Only the VM was in C: stop and copy garbage collection, bytecode interpreter and primitives. Small and straightforward. A wonderful system for learning how to implement languages.

Sources to several versions: https://github.com/crcx/littlesmalltalk

The version from the book is under the subdirectory lst1/. The later version you mentioned is probably under lst4/. Thought you'd like to know.

I'm going to have to take a look. I really liked the simplicity of that version. Thank you.

An archive of "The Little Smalltalk" code is still available here https://github.com/crcx/littlesmalltalk

The last update was six years ago.

I had the pleasure of taking my compilers course from Dr. Budd at Oregon State University while finishing up my CS degree almost 25 years ago. Good lecturer, nice guy. Glad to see his work getting some love from HN.

I had a multi-paradim class with Dr Budd when he visited DAIMI, the CS dept. of Aarhus Uni. He had the ability to make everything seem simple and logical. And he was one of the most approachable professors I’ve had.

I remember getting this book as a kid. Textual smalltalk. It’s how I learnt OO. With CRC cards.

Cool. I've just started getting into Smalltalk and will check this out.

Little Smalltalk is great and I highly recommend it. But it and GNU Smalltalk only give you access to the bare language itself, while Smalltalks with graphical user interfaces given you a very different programming experience.

I am trying to compile list of the many different Smalltalk implementations:

https://github.com/jeceljr/SmalltalkSurvey

That's an interesting list, thanks.

Seems like everyone had the same idea in 2020.

Note that Dan's and my stuff is written in C++ (not C).

Thanks for the correction - I fixed the list. I do note that github lists Dan's project as 81.6% C and 17.1% C++. Yours is indicated as nearly all C++ plus some Lua.

This is just a start - there is quite a bit to improve on that list.

Just found Amber from that list and am loving the interactive tutorial.

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