My sentiments exactly Les,
Having programmed Mainframes and Digitalk/V286 (mid 80's) myself and hand
build micros in the mid 70's (8080 switch programming) I know the feeling
and the fun of being in control. At the risk of being seen as even more
absurd, I prefered the earlier 640k XT version of V, believing that just the
Intel MMU was extending smalltalk too far.
Not knowing Lisp, I made good use of the Prolog extension (Mike Teng) ported
by some advanced thinker within Digitalk.
If I sometimes feel like screaming at the world for rushing headlong into
extension for extensions sake I occasionally read the following
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/574
He has probably hanged himself by now. Although I don't hold the same goal
as he does (did), he certainly performed some magic with Prolog and managed
to contain the class sprawl. Therein lay the secret to the Network Computer
that Java tried but failed to deliver.
I sometimes wonder if Adele Goldbergs remembers him.
Justin
Sorry just a little onset of dementia.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Les Tyrrell" <tyrrell at canis.uiuc.edu>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: Learning Squeak


>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
> To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 3:22 PM
> Subject: Re: Learning Squeak
>
>
> > Les --
> >
> > I think it would be great for some of the experienced Smalltalkers on
> > the list to take a crack at making a "filtered Browser" for a core
> > Squeak for beginners. How about ~ 100 classes to do most things? My
> > personal preference would be for a set of abstractions that include
> > Morphic instead of MVC, but any nice filtering would be a great
> > start. To do this really nicely, it might require a few new classes
> > to be made that are the higher-level abstraction for what is now
> > "over subclassing" in the current system.
>
> Actually, in the last few weeks I've been looking at Paul Fernhout's
Embedded
> Squeak.  I believe that this is based on a stripped-down Squeak 2.2 mini
> image, resulting in only about 214 classes in the system.  Using this is
> strongly reminiscent of what I had in V/286- except that even this version
of
> Squeak, running with 4-bit graphics depth,  feels much better.  I would
have
> been very happy to have a Smalltalk like this back then.  When I look at
it, I
> have a strong sense of  being able to Grok the whole thing- I can make the
> whole thing my own, perhaps in the same sense that Papert talked about
> children making math their own.  I don't get that sense when it looks like
I
> have thousands of classes to work with- its great that they are available,
but
> I'm not going to be taking personal ownership of them.  So, I feel there
is an
> important difference in the experience of being exposed to a few tens or
> hundreds of classes, versus many hundreds or thousands.
>
> Perhaps I am getting nostalgic, but lately I have also been thinking that
we
> are losing ( or have already lost ) something of the feel of the old
> computers.  It may be unjustified, but I feel that there was more
innovation
> in the early days of micro-computing.  Why don't we call them "personal"
> computers anymore?  Now they are PC's.   Ted Nelson had a quote that was
> roughly "We used to worry about big companies tyranizing our lives with
their
> mainframes.  Now, thanks to the miracle of micro-electronics, we can be
> tyranized by mainframes in the comfort of our own living rooms".  Neal
> Stephenson wrote "in the beginning was the command line", roughly touching
on
> some of my feelings along those lines.  But I am more inclined to think
the
> issue was not GUI vs. command line, but rather the loss of alternatives
( no
> matter how ugly ) when standardized ways of interacting with the various
> computers were introduced.  Now, the tyranny is so complete that we hardly
> question what we have.  Whatever happened to the totally blank screen, the
> empty slate where you could imagine the computer doing things in the way
that
> *you* imagined, rather than someone else in Silicon Valley?  I think there
is
> something powerful in the idea of having something where you feel that you
are
> the one who has total ownership and control of how it works.
>
> I'll have to give your idea some more thought... I know that this is
somthing
> that you've mentioned before.  The challenge might be to bring back that
sense
> of ownership to the experience, while also retaining ( or perhaps even
> enhancing ) the abiltiy to share components between our images.
>
> - les
>
>
>