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Smalltalk Type

moritzfuerst.net

82 pointsrbanffy34 comments

The ASCII character set standardization and subsequent keyboards has had a huge impact on programming languages. Characters not found on a standard keyboard are hardly ever used. And if thy are, it cause lots of issues, because they are so hard to type. I hope we get cheap reconfigurable keyboards with oled key caps in the near future. It could revitalize programming language design using a more powerful syntax with symbols etc.

People will use something like |> and make a ligature for it in the font, that looks like this ▷. and that's it. However, have you seen this: https://fluxkeyboard.com

They'll do it now, the same way in some ST's you wrote := and it got translated to a left-pointing-arrow.

Let's not forget that in the early 80's, more than 8 bits per character was something that almost never happened.

Objectworks (iirc) used := but left it as is ie 'untranslated'

The first Smalltalk-80 used still required the left arrow for assignment.

It was a real PITA because it was underbar (_, shift-dash) on the keyboard iirc.

Any assignment made me want to drink, thus the character name.

Cuis smalltalk has left arrow gliph for assignement assigned to underbar. I did not know it is historically accurate, thanks! :raises his cup:

In some equipment, like the Teletype Model 33[1], you had left arrow and up arrow instead of _ and ^. This was part of the 1963 draft of ASCII, but was changed in the final version. In the early 1980s there was still a lot of equipment by DEC and Xerox stuck with the original version, which was what the creators of Smalltalk-80 were familiar with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

Having lived part of the early history, I'd counter that this was a very good thing indeed. ASCII provided some sanity and allowed ideas to spread and proliferate.

We can revisit the character sets now that Unicode is ubiquitous. As for typing non-ASCII characters, that has been daily practices for decades _outside_ of north America.

Eh, wait. Maybe for comments and strings, but we, the non-ASCII language users such as Spanish, avoided to put ñ's and accented chars as _code_ almost as a religious dogma.

Tildes in Spanish are just used to mark the stressed syllabe when it's outside the stressing rules, and the diaeresis it's to make the 'u' non silent in gue/gui/que/qui. So if we read "funcion" without being written "función", don't worry, we aren't writting a literary test, it's code.

I'd hate to debug code written in Chinese instead of English, even if English it's a language I just use in academical and technical environments (and some nerdy games translated from Japanese or classical retro games from Unix workstations, playing either Trek or Slashem it's not reading Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare). And Golang allows that I think, and lots of languages too.

Believe you meant to write that _accents_ are used to mark stress that's outside the normal rules

That's what I meant.

Cool stuff. What's funny is that when learning Smalltalk, I got used to proportional fonts for programming, but only in a Smalltalk environment. I still find it odd to see that in another editor, and I have no idea why.

Because Smalltalk already shows up the main structure in boxes.

I noticed the same thing: loved Smalltalk-80, but when editing documents or code in Emacs, I need monospaced fonts.

I actually replaced my programming fonts with serif fonts in all languages after a few years in Smalltalk. It’s not quite as good in a brace language like Java, but for Python it works really well, I find.

Nice, here they are being used on their blog https://moritzfuerst.net/micro - lovely aesthetic.

I dislike the anti-aliasing of the pixelated fonts.

fair, maybe they will release a non-aliased version?

Author here, you two mind telling me which operating system / browser / screen res you used? These render crisp on all my devices with macOS/ iOS in Safari and Firefox. Could be Chrome does sth I have to disable.

woah - you are correct. I am on MacOS and it is antialiased in chrome but looks great and pixeltastic in safari! Hopefully just a css incantation or something?

I find that the text of the site looks bad on Firefox in Linux, much worse than the screenshot of the actual Smalltalk system: https://i.imgur.com/LP2yNRI.png

Maybe they're just not doing as well at larger sizes?

Thanks for the screenshot. I think there certainly is something to that – these typefaces were designed to render at exactly one specific size. I mean that's why there is a "Sans10" and a "Sans12" in the ST-80 GUI. I've drawn a few glyphs of the 12 already, it's quite interesting how these faces differ between weights and sizes…

I made a webfont test page where you can see Sans10 at the original size[1]

There are rendering differences, in Firefox the type colour[2] is slightly lighter than in Safari. I'll have to look if there is a way to disable font-smoothing across Browsers with CSS.

[1]: https://moritzfuerst.net/projects/smalltalk-type/webfont-tes...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_color

macOS Ventura 13.2.1 Safari Version 16.3 (18614.4.6.1.6) Dell 3840x2160 scaled to 2560x1440

Thank you. So my guess is the 1.5 display scaling plays a role here— there is a penalty to that, since it's not mapping pixels 1:1.[1] So macOS has to do some kind of anti-aliasing?

I'm of course not the first to find out,[2] but it's probably not advisable to try to make raster fonts work as webfonts nowadays. There is no reliable way to disable anti-aliasing. Even if there were, one would be very limited in terms of type sizes, which becomes moot because of displays running with odd scaling… and so on.

[1]: https://appleinsider.com/inside/macos/tips/what-is-display-s...

[2]: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/125

You can get the device pixel ratio from JavaScript using Window.devicePixelRatio. Maybe you can then add this as a css-variable to the body element and query it later on to compute a size for the fonts so they can match the "native" size of the pixels, for example using ggt.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/devi...

Nerd sniped--I want that monitor mentioned in one of the posts. [1] (Dual-panel stacked in 16:18 overall format, though only 2560 x 2880. Nice mount.)

[1] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b

No, what we should do is put some pressure on Eizo to make us a 5120 x 5120! (;

I would kill for a 1:1 aspect screen. Unfortunately the only one I found (an Eizo) is out of stock everywhere and apparently out of production.

I bought one a couple of weeks ago since a lot of what I do suits portrait layout rather than landscape. It's really, really nice.

The smalltalk interface is really one of the cleanest interfaces ever created. Too bad the software stack hasn't been put together in a complete desktop even like a simple one such as TempleOS

There was a variant of Squeak that ran on bare metal: http://squeaknos.blogspot.com

There is the more recent CogNos/NopSys [1,2] "an evolution of the SqueakNOS project" "a Smalltalk virtual machine running on bare x86 hardware", but that project has also been inactive for several years.

1. https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS

2. https://charig.github.io/assets/papers/SCDE-DLS.pdf

You could say that NextStep was a practical attempt. I think it failed, even though it's quite wonderful.

Wonderful!

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