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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Using this, I found myself back in CSE 341 at UW using Smalltalk VisualWorks. Nothing has changed a bit, and the world has moved on.

Also, directness isn't liveness. But then they don't define live at all, so it could mean anything.

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The world has changed in many ways, and there is plenty of that these exciting shiny things to play with, if you wish. Yet too many great ideas were abandoned because, among other reasons, they were too ahead of their times. I welcome efforts like this, because they let these ideas to be known to the current generation, not just as history, but as something that fits into today's environment, tooling and goals.

How many attempts to create the perfect ide for programming the web, in the web, and yet we keep the distinction of what is source "file" and what is the app being run, and how you debug it. Smalltalk and it's developing environment made blurred this boundary, and might be a great inspiration if not a practical solution.

It was a great idea in the 80s, or even in 1995 when I tried it out myself. A lot of those ideas were cherry picked by people like Dave Thomas (OTI) into what later became IBM Smalltalk/Java VisualAge and eventually...Eclipse. Ya, the real world is a bit messier and no one has brought images over BECAUSE we couldn't make them work in practice, but 95% of the ideas have been transferred.

I find what Bracha is doing in NewSpeak to be much more interesting and up to date with modern times. Just rehashing a 20 year old interface and putting it in the web is great from a retro perspective, but it doesn't move us forward at all.

It is high time to move out of Smalltalk's shadow.

smalltalk is so dead nowadays that I see no point wishing to move out of it's shadow. A lot of research has been done from it, many different languages have proven to be more interesting from many aspects etc etc no need to argue about that.

The good thing about bring it back to life is for educational purpose, as, unlike many other research, smalltalks tended to have more complete and mature development environment, and I believe it might be inspiring get a feel of how to do things that way, I doubt any kid today will be inspired by doing something on vxworks

I love how people is so fast to bash the work of others. And I love to see how people can be so arrogant that they can ignore the main principle of communication: give arguments when you state something. Smalltalk is not dead, but is true is not mainstream. Nevertheless, there are companies using it in very large and hard environments (JP Morgan, OCML, etc.) and there are many researchers using it and bringing new cool stuff every year (stuff that in time can or cannot be ported to other languages), for example the research team where I work.

Yes... is not popular as Java, or .NET, or even Python. But banishing a language for not being popular is the worst argument I ever hear.

sorry I didn't mean to bash other people's work, quite the opposite. Even if it's not mainstream and probably not the "next great thing", I welcome anyone who has passion to develop it and bring it to the masses.

I don't understand why you are offended because I said that smalltalk is dead. It's just a way to say that it's not mainstream and probably it will never be again. And the sad thing is that for most part the reason of its reduced popularity has nothing to do with its technical merits, but this deserves a whole thread and if I remember correctly it has been covered many times before.

And yet...so many have copied so much from it.

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