Thank you for all the interesting discussions we have had during the
past year. I also appreciate all the interesting work being done
with different programming languages. I regret that I haven't the
capacity for following this work in detail. I hope this work will
continue and thrive and wish you all a Happy New Year.
I forward my message to two of the Smalltalk lists to share with
you where my mind is moving these days. You may notice that I
haven't mentioned DCI explicitly. It is, of course, an essential
part of my idea of an object computer. I will describe this when
BabyIDE before long will be made generally available.
--Trygve
-------- Forwarded Message --------
On 25.12.2014 01:22, Yoshiki Ohshima
wrote:
A holiday present from the past! I digitized a video tape that VPRI
has and uploaded:
http://youtu.be/4ki2AQvneD8
Hope you enjoy it!
Dear Dan,
Thank you for taking the trouble to record the history of
Smalltalk history; I think it is both interesting and important to
understand how the Smalltalk technology evolved.
I hear you refer to Smalltalk as a programming language. Most of
the programmers I know will misunderstand this. To them, a program
is a text written in a programming language. The text is the Real
Thing, the executable is derived.
Contrast with Alan's definition of object orientation: Objects
are like computers communicating through a very fast network. With
Smalltalk, communication became a first class citizen of
computing. The Real Thing is now a universe of communicating
objects. Objects are mustered on the fly to perform a task. There
is no "Smalltalk Language" in the common sense of the word. It is
true that Smalltalk releases have a default language for
compiling methods within a class. The compiler is private to the
class; other classes may use different compilers and, therefore,
different languages. For example, VisualWorks had a class where
the methods were written in SQL.
My main objection to calling Smalltalk a programing language is
that it belittles its importance. IMO, Alan's concept of object
orientation that is reified in Smalltalk is the the most important
software invention since the first programming languages in the
1950s. It heralds an entirely new way of thinking about computing
by replacing the underlying digital computer with a universe of
communicating entities. I call it an
object computer. (I
see signs of this idea cropping up in other contexts as for
example in "
Unikernels:
Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System").
We are only scratching the surface of the object computer's
capabilities. I hope we in the coming years will deepen our
understanding of what this invention entails and create powerful
ways to exploit it. Squeak and its derivatives give us a flying
start.
I wish you all a productive and Happy New Year
--Trygve