Smalltalk & Squeak featured on Slashdot

Jerry Jackson jrj at channelpoint.com
Thu Apr 19 14:53:29 UTC 2001


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay at disney.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 9:34 AM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: RE: Smalltalk & Squeak featured on Slashdot
> 
> > 
> Guess where the Interlisp-D environment came from ..... and when ... 
> and what code was used to do its window system .....
> 

I guess I should have known :-)  I knew that a lot of Smalltalk work was
going
on at Xerox but I was pretty immersed in the Lisp world and didn't really
dig into it.
I even attended a LOOPS workshop at PARC once but the Xerox folks involved
(mainly Dan Bobrow and Mark Stefik) never really made a point of the debt
that the LOOPS system owed to Smalltalk.

It's really pretty sad that back in
the mid-80's I was surrounded by amazing programming environments (in the
AI lab at NOSC in San Diego) -- Interlisp-D machines, Symbolics and LMI
machines, etc.
When they didn't catch on in the mainstream I assumed it was because they
all ran on
expensive, unusual hardware.  Later when Harlequin came out with a decent
CommonLisp
environment that ran on commodity hardware I thought things would change (so
much so that
I went to work at Harlequin for a while :-).

Here we are close to 20 years later and IDEs are everywhere but they're
almost
universally lame.  I have yet to find an IDE for any of the 'C' based
languages (including
Java which I spend most of my time doing) that can wean me away from Emacs!

Thanks for the history lesson, Alan!





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