The Early History Of Smalltalk (1993)

I really wonder what the software world would look like today if the Smalltalk environment had predominated. It seems like various ideas from the Kay's group get reinvented from time to time, but we it's not really mainstream. Even the RAD tools from the 90s somewhat fell out of favor, partially due to the rise of the web, which meant reinventing everything in the browser. From hearing several talks by Alan Kay since then, it doesn't sound like software quite…

> "Smalltalk's design—and existence—is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that…

I've been on a Smalltalk kick the last couple of weeks (studied/used it in college, remembered many of the ideas but had never done a proper deep dive before). This was one of the papers I read and found particularly interesting, not just for its talk about Smalltalk itself but also about teaching programming (both to kids and adults). There have been several past discussions. Ones with more than 1 comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012425 - Nov 7, 2020 (28 comments)…

> The mental image was one of separate computers sending requests to other computers that had to be accepted and understood by the receivers before anything could happen. In today's terms every object would be a server offering services whose deployment and discretion depended entirely on the server's notion of relationship with the server. 1993 called and wants its micro-services. That is great. At least it seems like he is describing Go's channels, Rust's tasks, and most of all Erlang's…