Smalltalk

Smalltalk is and was a breakthrough combination programming language and operating system, created between 1972 and 1980 at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: PARC. It was the first fully (pure) object-oriented language, and thus is a grandparent of all OO languages.The main language influences inspiring and informing the creation of Smalltalk were Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad graphics program/language, Simula, Lisp and Seymour Papert's Logo dialect, and ML.Smalltalk is far more than only a programming language. It is also a complete and powerful operating system (OS). Many traits make it so. All original Smalltalks ran on bare hardware, with no intervening OS, and some still do. All Smalltalks have their own internal scheduling, storage management, display handling, keyboard input, subsystems access, debugger, graphic user interface (GUI), application programming interface (API), one can write programs, from short scripts to full applications to run in it, and ignore any OS below. Smalltalks not using the file system of an underlying OS, have their own.Being a language+OS is part of the early foundation philosophy behind the design and implementation of Smalltalk. Consider these two quotes by one of Smalltalk's earliest and primary designers, Dan Ingalls:

"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." -- Daniel H. H. Ingalls; Design Principles Behind Smalltalk; Byte Magazine, August 1981.

"In this way, the underlying metaphor of communicating objects can be seen to operate all the way up to the level which corresponds to a conventional operating system." -- Daniel H. H. Ingalls; The Smalltalk-76 Programming System: Design and Implementation; Conference Record, Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), 1978.Open Source implementations: GNU Smalltalk, Pocket Smalltalk, Squeak.Smalltalk's inventors, the famous Alan Kay team from Xerox PARC, are now working on the free implementation Squeak. It is only a download away.

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Sub-Categories:

Self
Squeak

News:

comp.object

OOPSLA'96 Electronic Information Hotline - 11th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications.
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Monty Kamath's GoodStart: Smalltalk Information - News, who uses it, dialects, tutorials, FAQs, books, links, great questions, polls, jobs, recruiters, interview jeopardy. Smalltalk's unofficial home.
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UIUC Smalltalk Archive - Big, famous Smalltalk software repository at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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WikiWorks - Wiki's home at UIUC. Several Wikis with much useful information on several Smalltalk topics.
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Steve Waring's Smalltalk Journal - A journal, mostly about Smalltalk. Includes articles, tutorials and sample code for Dolphin Smalltalk.
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CMPnet TechWeb TechEncyclopedia: Smalltalk - Great resource: over 11,000 definitions.
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Smalltalk.org - New, one-stop source for Smalltalk links and information.
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Smalltalk Chronicles - Free online Smalltalk magazine published by The Object People, Inc.
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Smalltalk Programming - Information, and many useful links of many types: documents, advocacy, environments, implementations, and design patterns.
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2002 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Awards - To Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, pioneers of object-oriented programming, and Smalltalk language and development environment. As researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), each saw in their own way the promise of objects, and was in a unique position to put theory into practice in an architecture based on objects at all levels. [Dr. Dobb's Journal]
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Hello, World program - Smalltalk
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Smalltalk Solutions 2001 Trip Report - Diverse opinions and debate, many useful points on Squeak, VisualAge, Dolphin, refactoring, Extreme Programming, Java, LISP, and Objective-C. [Slashdot]
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Instantiations - Contains product downloads, literature, related links, purchase details, and free Smalltalk products.
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Why Smalltalk? - The goal of this website is to help answer this very complex question. There are very many features in Smalltalk that combine to make it the best.
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Bytesmiths Smalltalk Information - Much Smalltalk information: full text of many publications and tutorial slides; description of a suite of team productivity tools for VisualWorks Smalltalk and ENVY/Developer, The Bytesmiths Toolkit; information on Smalltalk consulting services. One of the Web's earliest Smalltalk sites: begun 1994.
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Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. - Nearly 500 pages of Smalltalk: experience, real world experiences, stories, OOPLSA trip reports, information on Smalltalk garbage collection theory, directory for consultants.
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The Smalltalk Brewery, Inc. - VisualWorks performance tuning, mentoring, training: we attack and fix the underlying source/cause of 80% of the performance problems attributed to Smalltalk: Procedural Object Oriented Programming: POOP.
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Smalltalk Gets Developers Talking - Interest in decades-old language grows as developers use it for Web applications and services, where one piece of software talks to others without knowing much about the other system, a concept originated in Smalltalk. [InformationWeek]
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Smalltalk Industry Council: STIC - Cohesive community where information, technical issues, new ideas, concerns are openly discussed to benefit the industry; for users and prospects, and those interested in many larger issues: standards, history.
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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk - By Dan Ingalls. Centerpiece article from the historic Smalltalk special issue, which sets out the main philosophy and principles of the system in terms any intelligent person can understand. [BYTE magazine]
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TUNES Project: Smalltalk - Unique description, links: Smalltalk, Squeak. [Open Content]
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Smalltalk Solutions 2002 Trip Report - Wiki-based trip report Go Smalltalk! conference to be held in Cincinnati Ohio, at Hyatt Regency Hotel and Cincinnati Convention Center, on 2002 April 22-24.
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Smalltalk Webring - Tools to join and navigate the Smalltalk Webring.
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Webopedia: Smalltalk - Briefly defines term, lists several good links for more information.
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Web Search for Smalltalk Languages Programming Computers - News search for Smalltalk Languages Programming Computers - encyclopedia entries for Smalltalk Languages Programming Computers