A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).
I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.
Rochus and I were arguing about this a couple of weeks ago, and I read through a bunch of historical papers, including Teitelbaum talking about how Smalltalk influenced Interlisp-D and Lampson more or less attributing the GUI to Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
I had no idea about the Interface Builder Lisp history! Thank you for digging that up!
Mesa and Cedar interested me as I got into programming languages, but I was more into Trellis/Owl (and had copies of the documentation provided to me by DEC SRC after I wrote to them).
MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.
We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
> I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
You should be, because I spent hours telling you about it, in detail, with citations and extensive quotes from the designers of the Alto and Bravo, less than two weeks ago. At the time you conceded the point and said it was not what you intended to dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
And please note that this is again a different topic.
Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.
Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.
In many ways NeXTSTEP can be thought of as a “pragmatic Smalltalk environment” that traded some of Smalltalk’s dynamism for improved compatibility with the Unix ecosystem. Recall that NeXT’s original target market was higher education, which even in the 1980s started relying on Unix. This was the era of the Unix workstation, and NeXT can be considered a competitor to Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, and other Unix workstation vendors. NeXT’s differentiator was its Smalltalk-inspired object-oriented environment, built on Objective-C.
I wonder, though, what a pure Smalltalk workstation would’ve looked like, and what hardware would’ve been necessary to make it fast. After all, the late 80s were the era of Lisp machines, though Lisp machines were much more expensive than NeXT cubes ever were. If I recall correctly, Smalltalk on the Xerox Alto was slow, but David Patterson (of RISC fame) had a PhD student who worked on a performant version of the Smalltalk VM, and some of that work went to a spiritual successor named Self, which heavily influenced the design of the Java VM. I remember Java feeling slow in the mid-1990s, but that might be due to bad memories of Java applets rather than a fundamental problem with Java VMs.
Tektronix sold Smalltalk workstations [1], you could run Lisp on them as well. You may have been able to run Smalltalk-80 on a Xerox Daybreak which was a fair bit faster than an Alto.
The first JIT was written by L Peter Deutsch for Smalltalk targeting the 68020.
Your original Smalltalk port described in "Bits of History, Words of Advice" wasn't on top of an operating system but the 4404 does have one. What was the reason for this, was it to be able to run the other languages on the 4404?
I've been looking for one of these for years. Dont think ive ever seen one for sale. Sadly my retrocimputing days (especially for such rare and likely expensive machines) is about over. I've met people willing to strike me good deals on lisp machines, but these are just a bit too obscure perhaps.
An another lot of people doesn't know that Smalltalk-76 onwards implemented the Simula 67 object model (as the first language in the given completeness), which represented a fundamental departure from Smalltalk-72. See the Ingalls 1978 and 2020 papers for more information (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335, both more interesting and relevant than the one in the title, written by the person who invented most of the technology we today know as Smalltalk-80).
When I was in college, Brad Cox came and gave a talk about Objective-C (and more generally his 'software IC' ideas). He was pretty clear how Smalltalk was a key influence. His book on ObjC discusses it as well. Very interesting stuff, even now.
I got to meet Brad Cox at college when he came to visit one of my professors (who I worked with after hours). I find it interesting that instead of the objects as tiny computers of Kay he thought of software ICs and then pulled from Smalltalk to implement those concepts in Objective-C, but in the simplest way possible (almost just combining the two side-by-side) as opposed to Stroustrup being more heavily influenced by Similar (especially as he was actually building simulations) and extending C into objects to gain performance that Simula didn’t have.
People naturally get hung up on the syntax and the interop story with existing popular languages, but it’s the object model differences between Smalltalk, Objective-C, Self, C++… that really matter.
I had the pleasure of learning OOP with Smalltalk at university back in 2002. They used it as the second language (Lisp was the first) to teach the principles. I really loved it. What I admired most was that you “lived” in your program. Later on, Java (1.4) was taught, but coming from Smalltalk, everything felt cumbersome, especially working with collections.
Of all the languages I’ve used in my professional career so far, only Ruby has sparked the same joy.
For me, it was Hamburg, Germany. They later replaced Smalltalk with Java and BlueJ, IIRC. It had a similar visual feel (you could click on a class and create an instance of it that then floated around), but it was far from pure OOP.
I was never a Smalltalk programmer ((although I did once debug a fairly simple Smalltalk module by looking at the printout of the code). But I did work for awhile in an OOPL built on top of Smalltalk. That project died because it was too slow, but also because the Smalltalk vendor the project used went out of business, leaving an incompatible and expensive Smalltalk as the only one left standing. (At least that's what I was told.)
Today the project is written in C++, which had the advantages of being free and fast (and as far as I can tell, incomprehensible and prone to crashing).
Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!
The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!
Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?
They were the ones that almost on day one pivoted their Smalltalk offerings into Java.
Eclipse still has the Visual Age Smalltalk object browser.
If you look into OS/2 documentation, and SOM (OS/2 version of COM), you will find out Smalltalk on OS/2 had a role similar to .NET on Windows.
I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.
> I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.
Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had a coffee yet, but I’m not following/parsing this last paragraph - can you expand?
Lisp was the AI language, alongside Prolog (see Japan's 5th generation computing project).
Instead of having nice Interlisp-D and Symbolics machines with their graphical tooling, hot code reloading and machine code generation, we got Jupiter notebooks and C/C++/Fortran libraries on a pure interpreted language [0].
Additionally in the 1990's there were several efforts to move into the next level of programming, with more human like languages, CASE tooling, RUP method (with UML), most of them failed, SQL is one of the survivors, think its declarative nature.
So while not all of those ideas caught on as expected, now we get to program in natural language, use Markdown waterfall plans for agents, integrate them with Web services, seat reading email and Internet surfing until their activities are ready for review.
In low code/no code cloud platforms like Workato, Boomi and co, classical programming is already past tense.
[0] - Granted now JIT is being part of CPython roadmap, and there are some nice IDEs for Python actually.
You're not a horrible person to enjoy that. However, the schadenfreude is only in your head. 2026 is the most amazing year of building software in human history, so far.
Well, programming feels that it will get closer Smalltalk. For webdev you get pretty mature HMR, you look at the interface and sometimes just point at things and tell a model to modify it. So pretty close to live medium +short feedback loops.
If the big labs wouldn't have the incentive of hiding the code and making you rely solely on the models, you'd probably also see more inspection tools and contextual changes when the model does them.
It depends, IMHO. If op is talking about "programming", then I think they are right. If they are talking about "development", then I think you are right.
I still don't agree. Nothing is stopping you from doing programming without AI and enjoy it like an art form just like people still paint even though they can just print. On the other hand, the amount of languages, tools, paradigms available are crazy and there's always something for everyone to enjoy.
Burroughs Large System (aka B5000-B8500) still (virtually) exist as Unisys Clearpath MCP. You could download a VM if you wanted to try it (I assume you still can).
BiiN and i960 are sorta the same thing to the extent that Intel took the BiiN work after that project died and commercialized it as the i960. Unfortunately, except for the early i960MC, XA & XM versions, Intel was busy stripping feature out of it to make an embedded processor instead of making use of the really cool parts. What might have been...
Smalltalk didn't start until 1971/2 (Alan Kay started at Xerox in early 1971 as a consultant and then joined as a full time member). It's covered in the HOPL article above
Somewhat related, I’ve been digesting this long but fascinating talk about the even earlier history of OOP, going all the way back to the 1950s. It’s from the perspective of someone who questions some early decisions about what OOP would become. Implementation inheritance, of course, which iirc is something Kay calls out as more accidental than principled language design decision in this paper. But also things like the physical arrangement of data in memory, and how all of this affects what kinds of problems will be easier or harder to solve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI Casey #Muratori’s keynote about, largely, #disjoint-unions and how it is sad that #C++ doesn’t have them. “I’m not saying OOP was a mistake. I’m saying this [a compile-time hierarchy of encapsulation that matches the domain model] was a mistake.” Also traces the #history of records in #programming-languages through Simula and Hoare’s record-handling paper and the “plex” of Douglass Ross of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory in AED, Algol Extended for Design, and also #Sketchpad, which had in-memory records (“chickens”) linked together in circular linked lists, which apparently was an idea he got from Ross (“n-component elements”). Both Ross’s plexes and Sketchpad had function pointers in the records. (But the constraint solver was “the most unencapsulated thing that you could possibly imagine”.) Also documents how Looking Glass in 01998 introduced the #Entity-Component-System pattern in Ultima II Underworld, but really introduced it with Tom Leonard’s Thief: The Dark Project. At 82'40” he points out that he independently invented a worse version of ECS at definitionSIX for Negaman in 01997. “It’s just, I sucked at it, and Looking Glass was good.” Basically his “35-year mistake” thesis is that we almost had ECS in 01963 with Sketchpad, but it took until 01998. He likens 01990s OOP dogma to playing Magic: The Gathering, which I think is insightful. At 136'45” he tells his devotee Ryan Fleury that he has snatched the stone from his hand and may now leave. Nice quote: “You should focus on the hardest stuff. You should say, ‘what solves the hardest problems?’ because we can always then take that and scale it down, and remove things from it or dumb it down, for people to use in cases that aren't as hard. But it’s almost impossible to take something that only solves simple problems and scale it up to something that solves hard ones.”
I'm interested to see the results of your digestion too!
There really should be a term for people that somehow got exposure to a tool (like Smalltalk) that despite being technically superior (or even just more interesting) but didn't succeed in popularity. They tend to be forever destined to long for a past when they had the freedom to use such a tool, and constantly bemoaning the state of current tools and listing the reasons why current tools are inferior.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars, weenie, Get a life!.
worrydream is Bret Victor's site. He gave some electrifying talks in the past like The Future of Programming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4). I really miss those!
I've OCR'ed and corrected Yoot Saito's 1992 interview with Alan Kay, and also restored the missing appendix sections with illustrations that are not included in Bret's version of Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk, and compiled and linked together indexes of people, institutions, technologies and a timeline:
In 1993, game designer Yutaka "Yoot" Saito interviewed Alan Kay for MACWORLD Japan, for the special issue marking the Macintosh's tenth anniversary (January 1994). The conversation was recorded on cassette and later transcribed. It had only been published in Japan.
Kay covers his own path through computing history: the Flex Machine, Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface, the Dynabook concept, and the creation of Smalltalk and object-oriented programming. He and Saito also discuss networking, education, simulation, and where personal computing might go next. Saito connects these ideas to game design.
During the interview both men appear to be working from Kay's HOPL paper, The Early History of Smalltalk, and its appendices as a shared reference. When Kay says "in that," "in there," or "in the appendix," the links in the transcript point to the relevant section where it can be identified.
The interview also documents Saito's role as a bridge between Japanese game and media culture and the US computing research that produced the personal computer.
Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk: Complete Local Edition
This is the local reading guide for Alan Kay's HOPL paper, The Early History Of Smalltalk, together with the restored appendix material, figures, presentation transcript, discussant remarks, Q&A, and related documentation preserved in this repository.
Credit and thanks to Bret Victor for publishing the cleaned-up HTML edition of the paper body and accompanying image set at worrydream/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk. The local paper body and EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk-* PNG files are derived from Bret's public edition. The appendix Markdown files here are local readable renderings from the OCR/plain-text appendix sources and local scans.
Just yesterday I was talking with a friend who works at Instantiations [1]. They were founded in 1988, and still ship a new release every year of Smalltalk. What I find fascinating is that customers are actively building on it and seem happy.
I really wish that there was a license/version/build marketed to hobbyists:
>Call or Email for Pricing
and the upgrade pricing is four figures (per set per year I'm guessing?).
Ages ago, I actually bought a Smalltalk for Windows compiler, but never got around to doing anything with it (which I regret) --- I suppose I should try Dolphin SmallTalk....
Dad is true Smalltalk believer, used to use visual age, instantiations etc but is a happy user of pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development so could give that one a try.
A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).
This is a good history:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-deep-history-of-your-ap...
Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar, Interlisp-D inside Xerox.
Mesa and Cedar influenced Niklaus Wirth to come up with Modula-2/Lillith and Oberon.
Which had an influence on Rob Pike, on how he developed ACME for Plan 9.
Meanwhile StrongTalk, and Objective-C ended up influencing how Java came to be, and its approach to JIT compilation.
On another track Smalltalk ends up influencing Self design, which ends up having an effect on how V8 JIT was designed.
Then there is Ruby as well.
Pity that with all of this, many still never tried what actually means to use Smalltalk.
Note that Interface Builder started as a Lisp prototype, before being acquired by NeXT.
https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...
I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.
Rochus and I were arguing about this a couple of weeks ago, and I read through a bunch of historical papers, including Teitelbaum talking about how Smalltalk influenced Interlisp-D and Lampson more or less attributing the GUI to Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
I had no idea about the Interface Builder Lisp history! Thank you for digging that up!
Mesa and Cedar interested me as I got into programming languages, but I was more into Trellis/Owl (and had copies of the documentation provided to me by DEC SRC after I wrote to them).
The LeLisp version of Interface Builder that JMH wrote at INRIA predates the timeline in your link.
That link is the official story I am aware of, where can I read about that one?
I have a paper copy of a paper (in French) about SOS Interface. Had scans of this at one point.
There is a bit more of a timeline in a talk [1] he gave at INRIA a couple of years before he died.
[1] https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
> Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar
In what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?
You and I already went through this discussion at great length two weeks ago, and I came up with lots of sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
The Xerox papers on digital archive, I can try to hunt them down, see for example the one on XDE Tajo experience for Mesa.
MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.
Yes my claim is about the IDE experience shared across all Xerox PARC environments, and how it affected the design of each language individually.
I will hunt down the papers.
We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
> I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
You should be, because I spent hours telling you about it, in detail, with citations and extensive quotes from the designers of the Alto and Bravo, less than two weeks ago. At the time you conceded the point and said it was not what you intended to dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
> I spent hours telling you about it
I hope not.
And please note that this is again a different topic.
Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.
Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.
If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., the Alto source code archive of the CHM, or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.
In many ways NeXTSTEP can be thought of as a “pragmatic Smalltalk environment” that traded some of Smalltalk’s dynamism for improved compatibility with the Unix ecosystem. Recall that NeXT’s original target market was higher education, which even in the 1980s started relying on Unix. This was the era of the Unix workstation, and NeXT can be considered a competitor to Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, and other Unix workstation vendors. NeXT’s differentiator was its Smalltalk-inspired object-oriented environment, built on Objective-C.
I wonder, though, what a pure Smalltalk workstation would’ve looked like, and what hardware would’ve been necessary to make it fast. After all, the late 80s were the era of Lisp machines, though Lisp machines were much more expensive than NeXT cubes ever were. If I recall correctly, Smalltalk on the Xerox Alto was slow, but David Patterson (of RISC fame) had a PhD student who worked on a performant version of the Smalltalk VM, and some of that work went to a spiritual successor named Self, which heavily influenced the design of the Java VM. I remember Java feeling slow in the mid-1990s, but that might be due to bad memories of Java applets rather than a fundamental problem with Java VMs.
Tektronix sold Smalltalk workstations [1], you could run Lisp on them as well. You may have been able to run Smalltalk-80 on a Xerox Daybreak which was a fair bit faster than an Alto.
The first JIT was written by L Peter Deutsch for Smalltalk targeting the 68020.
[1] https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/te... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Daybreak
https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/tektro...
Your original Smalltalk port described in "Bits of History, Words of Advice" wasn't on top of an operating system but the 4404 does have one. What was the reason for this, was it to be able to run the other languages on the 4404?
I've been looking for one of these for years. Dont think ive ever seen one for sale. Sadly my retrocimputing days (especially for such rare and likely expensive machines) is about over. I've met people willing to strike me good deals on lisp machines, but these are just a bit too obscure perhaps.
Yeah...wouldn't we all like to find a Tek 4404 :-)? You might like to live vicariously through this guy: https://medium.com/@adambillyard/restoring-an-ai-workstation...
He seems to have added emulation of the 4404 to Mame.
I had a brief play on a 4404 at an exhibition when they were new but have never seen any for sale since.
Interface Builder was originally a Lisp project
https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-visionary-computer...
An another lot of people doesn't know that Smalltalk-76 onwards implemented the Simula 67 object model (as the first language in the given completeness), which represented a fundamental departure from Smalltalk-72. See the Ingalls 1978 and 2020 papers for more information (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335, both more interesting and relevant than the one in the title, written by the person who invented most of the technology we today know as Smalltalk-80).
This is correct.
When I was in college, Brad Cox came and gave a talk about Objective-C (and more generally his 'software IC' ideas). He was pretty clear how Smalltalk was a key influence. His book on ObjC discusses it as well. Very interesting stuff, even now.
I got to meet Brad Cox at college when he came to visit one of my professors (who I worked with after hours). I find it interesting that instead of the objects as tiny computers of Kay he thought of software ICs and then pulled from Smalltalk to implement those concepts in Objective-C, but in the simplest way possible (almost just combining the two side-by-side) as opposed to Stroustrup being more heavily influenced by Similar (especially as he was actually building simulations) and extending C into objects to gain performance that Simula didn’t have.
People naturally get hung up on the syntax and the interop story with existing popular languages, but it’s the object model differences between Smalltalk, Objective-C, Self, C++… that really matter.
ref: https://www.abebooks.com/9780201834543/Object-Model-Lippman-...
s/Similar/Simula/
Similar would be the perfect name for a Simula Simlator.
Slimula is to Simula as Minyma is to Macsyma.
Some prior discussions on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062369 - April 20, 2022 (45 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012425 - Nov 7, 2020 (28 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913668 - Sept 4, 2018 (69 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9907556 - July 18, 2015 (5 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588316 - May 22, 2015 (5 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926141 - June 21, 2014 (10 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311282 - May 1, 2010 (17 comments)
I had the pleasure of learning OOP with Smalltalk at university back in 2002. They used it as the second language (Lisp was the first) to teach the principles. I really loved it. What I admired most was that you “lived” in your program. Later on, Java (1.4) was taught, but coming from Smalltalk, everything felt cumbersome, especially working with collections. Of all the languages I’ve used in my professional career so far, only Ruby has sparked the same joy.
Was it at Carleton? Ottawa seems to have a fondness for Smalltalk and seems to have been a… hotspot for it.
For me, it was Hamburg, Germany. They later replaced Smalltalk with Java and BlueJ, IIRC. It had a similar visual feel (you could click on a class and create an instance of it that then floated around), but it was far from pure OOP.
I was never a Smalltalk programmer ((although I did once debug a fairly simple Smalltalk module by looking at the printout of the code). But I did work for awhile in an OOPL built on top of Smalltalk. That project died because it was too slow, but also because the Smalltalk vendor the project used went out of business, leaving an incompatible and expensive Smalltalk as the only one left standing. (At least that's what I was told.)
Today the project is written in C++, which had the advantages of being free and fast (and as far as I can tell, incomprehensible and prone to crashing).
Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!
The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!
Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?
Blame IBM and other Smalltalk vendors.
They were the ones that almost on day one pivoted their Smalltalk offerings into Java.
Eclipse still has the Visual Age Smalltalk object browser.
If you look into OS/2 documentation, and SOM (OS/2 version of COM), you will find out Smalltalk on OS/2 had a role similar to .NET on Windows.
I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.
> I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.
Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had a coffee yet, but I’m not following/parsing this last paragraph - can you expand?
Sure.
Lisp was the AI language, alongside Prolog (see Japan's 5th generation computing project).
Instead of having nice Interlisp-D and Symbolics machines with their graphical tooling, hot code reloading and machine code generation, we got Jupiter notebooks and C/C++/Fortran libraries on a pure interpreted language [0].
Additionally in the 1990's there were several efforts to move into the next level of programming, with more human like languages, CASE tooling, RUP method (with UML), most of them failed, SQL is one of the survivors, think its declarative nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_generatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_unified_process
So while not all of those ideas caught on as expected, now we get to program in natural language, use Markdown waterfall plans for agents, integrate them with Web services, seat reading email and Internet surfing until their activities are ready for review.
In low code/no code cloud platforms like Workato, Boomi and co, classical programming is already past tense.
[0] - Granted now JIT is being part of CPython roadmap, and there are some nice IDEs for Python actually.
Interesting!
Were you using IBM Visual Age Smalltalk?
I for one already have the popcorn at the ready. Can't wait for it.
You're not a horrible person to enjoy that. However, the schadenfreude is only in your head. 2026 is the most amazing year of building software in human history, so far.
Well, programming feels that it will get closer Smalltalk. For webdev you get pretty mature HMR, you look at the interface and sometimes just point at things and tell a model to modify it. So pretty close to live medium +short feedback loops.
If the big labs wouldn't have the incentive of hiding the code and making you rely solely on the models, you'd probably also see more inspection tools and contextual changes when the model does them.
It depends, IMHO. If op is talking about "programming", then I think they are right. If they are talking about "development", then I think you are right.
I still don't agree. Nothing is stopping you from doing programming without AI and enjoy it like an art form just like people still paint even though they can just print. On the other hand, the amount of languages, tools, paradigms available are crazy and there's always something for everyone to enjoy.
Most beautiful computer syntax of the world.
Smalltalk is conceptual-centric in ways that are remarkably deep.
Pity our hardware architectures couldn't give us better hardware support.
Not that they didn't tried:
- Burroughs B5000 (1961)
- Intel iAPX 432 (1981–1986)
- BiiN project (1985–1990)
- Intel i960
- Rekursiv (Linn)
- jHISC ~2005
- MOOSS 2003
- Structural Object Processor (Xilinx)
Burroughs Large System (aka B5000-B8500) still (virtually) exist as Unisys Clearpath MCP. You could download a VM if you wanted to try it (I assume you still can).
BiiN and i960 are sorta the same thing to the extent that Intel took the BiiN work after that project died and commercialized it as the i960. Unfortunately, except for the early i960MC, XA & XM versions, Intel was busy stripping feature out of it to make an embedded processor instead of making use of the really cool parts. What might have been...
What is the Structural Object Processor?
Another hardware project was MUSHROOM [1]
[1] https://www.wolczko.com/mushroom/index.html
What is really surprising to me is that Smalltalk was originally targeted as an educational language for children:
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/#smalltalkAnd...
In this way, it was the older brother of Logo, but with a core object scaffold that was far more influential.
> it was the older brother of Logo
Logo predated Smalltalk, so Smalltalk is more like an evolution on the idea and a younger brother.
EDIT: Looked up the dates. Logo was made in 1967, Smalltalk started development in 1969.
Smalltalk didn't start until 1971/2 (Alan Kay started at Xerox in early 1971 as a consultant and then joined as a full time member). It's covered in the HOPL article above
I should have checked that.
I remember that Logo was available for my TI-99/4a and assumed it was closer to the '80s.
I'd like to see LOGO but with support for 3-D, accelerated with CUDA
Somewhat related, I’ve been digesting this long but fascinating talk about the even earlier history of OOP, going all the way back to the 1950s. It’s from the perspective of someone who questions some early decisions about what OOP would become. Implementation inheritance, of course, which iirc is something Kay calls out as more accidental than principled language design decision in this paper. But also things like the physical arrangement of data in memory, and how all of this affects what kinds of problems will be easier or harder to solve.
https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
My summary from http://canonical.org/~kragen/human-folly/day/02025-07-22.htm...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI Casey #Muratori’s keynote about, largely, #disjoint-unions and how it is sad that #C++ doesn’t have them. “I’m not saying OOP was a mistake. I’m saying this [a compile-time hierarchy of encapsulation that matches the domain model] was a mistake.” Also traces the #history of records in #programming-languages through Simula and Hoare’s record-handling paper and the “plex” of Douglass Ross of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory in AED, Algol Extended for Design, and also #Sketchpad, which had in-memory records (“chickens”) linked together in circular linked lists, which apparently was an idea he got from Ross (“n-component elements”). Both Ross’s plexes and Sketchpad had function pointers in the records. (But the constraint solver was “the most unencapsulated thing that you could possibly imagine”.) Also documents how Looking Glass in 01998 introduced the #Entity-Component-System pattern in Ultima II Underworld, but really introduced it with Tom Leonard’s Thief: The Dark Project. At 82'40” he points out that he independently invented a worse version of ECS at definitionSIX for Negaman in 01997. “It’s just, I sucked at it, and Looking Glass was good.” Basically his “35-year mistake” thesis is that we almost had ECS in 01963 with Sketchpad, but it took until 01998. He likens 01990s OOP dogma to playing Magic: The Gathering, which I think is insightful. At 136'45” he tells his devotee Ryan Fleury that he has snatched the stone from his hand and may now leave. Nice quote: “You should focus on the hardest stuff. You should say, ‘what solves the hardest problems?’ because we can always then take that and scale it down, and remove things from it or dumb it down, for people to use in cases that aren't as hard. But it’s almost impossible to take something that only solves simple problems and scale it up to something that solves hard ones.”
I'm interested to see the results of your digestion too!
I still have my August 1981 BYTE at work. It and the 1980 FORTH (or TIL) greatly influenced my preferences in programming languages.
(Oh, I also have the blue book, green book and red book at work.)
There really should be a term for people that somehow got exposure to a tool (like Smalltalk) that despite being technically superior (or even just more interesting) but didn't succeed in popularity. They tend to be forever destined to long for a past when they had the freedom to use such a tool, and constantly bemoaning the state of current tools and listing the reasons why current tools are inferior.
There's been a term for the phenomenon for decades: "Amiga Persecution Complex":
https://freedictionary.org/search/amiga_persecution_complex
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, holy wars, weenie, Get a life!.
Oddly it doesn't mention Smalltalk!
worrydream is Bret Victor's site. He gave some electrifying talks in the past like The Future of Programming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4). I really miss those!
I've OCR'ed and corrected Yoot Saito's 1992 interview with Alan Kay, and also restored the missing appendix sections with illustrations that are not included in Bret's version of Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk, and compiled and linked together indexes of people, institutions, technologies and a timeline:
Yoot Saito Alan Kay Interview: Introduction:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
In 1993, game designer Yutaka "Yoot" Saito interviewed Alan Kay for MACWORLD Japan, for the special issue marking the Macintosh's tenth anniversary (January 1994). The conversation was recorded on cassette and later transcribed. It had only been published in Japan.
Kay covers his own path through computing history: the Flex Machine, Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface, the Dynabook concept, and the creation of Smalltalk and object-oriented programming. He and Saito also discuss networking, education, simulation, and where personal computing might go next. Saito connects these ideas to game design.
During the interview both men appear to be working from Kay's HOPL paper, The Early History of Smalltalk, and its appendices as a shared reference. When Kay says "in that," "in there," or "in the appendix," the links in the transcript point to the relevant section where it can be identified.
The interview also documents Saito's role as a bridge between Japanese game and media culture and the US computing research that produced the personal computer.
Yoot Saito Alan Kay Interview:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
A Journey Through Computing History with Yoot Saito and Alan Kay
And here are missing secions from Bret's version of Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk:Early History of Smalltalk, Complete:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk: Complete Local Edition
This is the local reading guide for Alan Kay's HOPL paper, The Early History Of Smalltalk, together with the restored appendix material, figures, presentation transcript, discussant remarks, Q&A, and related documentation preserved in this repository.
Credit and thanks to Bret Victor for publishing the cleaned-up HTML edition of the paper body and accompanying image set at worrydream/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk. The local paper body and EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk-* PNG files are derived from Bret's public edition. The appendix Markdown files here are local readable renderings from the OCR/plain-text appendix sources and local scans.
The Early History Of Smalltalk:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Detailed paper body index:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix I: KiddiKomp Memo 45:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix II: Smalltalk-72 Interpreter Design 47:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix III: Acknowledgments 50:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix IV: Event Driven Loop Example 53:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix V: Smalltalk-76 Internal Structures 54:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Appendix VI: Smalltalk Documentation, HOPL Talk, and Discussion:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
References:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Transcript of presentation:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
And I've made some additional cross references including the Yoot Saito Interview:
People:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Institutions:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Technologies:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Timeline:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Just yesterday I was talking with a friend who works at Instantiations [1]. They were founded in 1988, and still ship a new release every year of Smalltalk. What I find fascinating is that customers are actively building on it and seem happy.
[1] https://www.instantiations.com/
I really wish that there was a license/version/build marketed to hobbyists:
>Call or Email for Pricing
and the upgrade pricing is four figures (per set per year I'm guessing?).
Ages ago, I actually bought a Smalltalk for Windows compiler, but never got around to doing anything with it (which I regret) --- I suppose I should try Dolphin SmallTalk....
Dad is true Smalltalk believer, used to use visual age, instantiations etc but is a happy user of pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development so could give that one a try.
There is Pharo (and Squeak) as a free SmallTalk.
Why did they name a programming language after a skill most programmers are bad at?