Smalltalk is not a language. Smalltalk is a place.

It may take one hour or +ten years to know what a "place" means. This topic is the most difficult thing to communicate in the computing community, because people thinks in terms of a language to talk to the computer.

Smalltalk is not a language. Smalltalk is a place.

It may take one hour or +ten years to know what a "place" means. This topic is the most difficult thing to communicate in the computing community, because people think in terms of a language to talk to the computer.(1) Smalltalk makes real a new perception of computer, been a place where things are sub-created by a men. (2)

What can be better than Smalltalk? If Smalltalk is a place with things (an environment with objects)... then a better Smalltalk is a Smalltalk with better objects... :-)

The great work to be done is in the creation of better objects and ways to evolve our environment in a more "natural" way (w/ evolution & selection). The dilution/missing of the machine & the language is very important to the humman-object relation. The better operating system is the OS that does not exist. (3) The better database is the database that does not exist. What about the better language ?

Holiday greetings to all. Ale.

(1) the conventional paradigm treats the computer like another human, and the programmer talk to it! In an Object Environment the machine is a place where things are living. (2) sub-creation understood as the activity of creation been done by humans; as the Creator, but in their imagination. J.R.Tolkien (3) please read "not exist" as "is transparent" to human.

---------- De: Bill Cattey[SMTP:wdc@MIT.EDU] Enviado: Sábado 19 de Diciembre de 1998 12:56 Para: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu Asunto: The cadence of Software Engineering.

Although I have been aware of Smalltalk for a very long time, (I mentioned it in my Undergraduate Thesis in 1983) I've not been at all serious in my study of it until I learned about Squeak this past October. For the past 15 years, I'd been doing what I'll call 'conventional' software engineering -- taking on multi-month and multi year projets to get something done.

Reading Dan Ingalls note about the Squeak 2.3 timeline, I suddenly found myself in a universe with a VERY different sense of how long things take to do. As I've chatted with Squeakers over the past couple months, I understood that my sense of what to do when and how long it took was different, but it seems that it's much more different than I imagined.

Let's take a moment to savor how Squeak is changing how we think about what is possible.

-wdc