At 11:09 AM -0800 8/13/01, Alan Kay wrote:

>Dan --
>
>See below ...

[snip]

>>As an alternate explanation, I would argue that in the case of all 
>>the languages mentioned, at the time of their creation, acronym or 
>>no, all of them were originally spelled in uppercase if only due to 
>>the lack of mixed case keyboards and keymaps.
>
>Smalltalk was always spelled this way (because we had made our own 
>bit-map displays and laserprinters and thus could make our own 
>display and printing fonts.

Hey, my first post to squeak-dev gets a reply from Alan Kay! Pardon 
me if I feel a little proud. ;]

Anyway, as you pointed out, Smalltalk is most definitely different 
from the rest. I was just commenting on the examples of Lisp, Forth, 
Basic, etc. FWIW, I tend to only capitalize initialisms, like APL, C, 
FCP, etc. I realize Basic is technically an initialism, but since it 
can be pronounced as a word, I take the easy way out. I suppose that 
most of this discussion can be chalked up to individual style, as 
long as the user employs some consistency across terms. YMMV.

In the context of considering someone for employment in a Smalltalk 
job on the basis of the spelling of Smalltalk in a resume or CV, I 
suspect I would ask more pointed direct technical questions, spelling 
nonwithstanding.


-- 
Dan Moniz <dnm at pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]