Table of Contents for Programming Languages: a survey

Smalltalk

Because of its importance as an exemplar of a style of computer language, Smalltalk gets its own chapter.

attributes:

big ideas: "We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding (..If you’re using early-binding languages as most people do, rather than late-binding languages, then you really start getting locked in to stuff that you’ve already done. You can’t reformulate things that easily...). The other one was the idea of objects." -- Alan Kay, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

people: Alan Kay

influences: "Sketchpad, Simula, the design for the ARPAnet, the Burroughs B5000, and my background in Biology and Mathematics" -- Alan Kay, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en

tutorials and books:

retrospectives:

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/smalltalk.html
some notes on this history of smalltalk are in the middle of: http://web.augsburg.edu/~crockett/210/210%20Lab%20Set%204/Reed_OOP_Epistemology.pdf
""In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing “computer stuff” into things each less strong than the whole – like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages – each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computer all hooked together by a very fast network." [1]
"Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word -- ma -- for "that which is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial". The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be." [2]
Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself
"Smalltalk-72, an object language described in one-page, McCarthy?-style, whose objects were kind of like closures that could parse their inputs" -- [3]
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Alan-Kays-definition-of-OOP-and-Carl-Hewitts-Actor-Model
https://computerhistory.org/blog/introducing-the-smalltalk-zoo-48-years-of-smalltalk-history-at-chm/

overviews:

Influential Programming Languages, Part 3: Smalltalk. By David Chisnall. Jan 5, 2011
A Brief History of Programming, Part 2 starting with section Simple Computers Passing Messages

code examples:

Smalltalk MVC Translated to JavaScript. Show the code implementing MVC in Smalltalk, alongside a direct Javascript translation. Briefly discusses "the three main design patterns of the MVC architecture": observer (objects can subscribe to get notifications of changes to other objects), strategy (views delegate decision making to controllers), composite (views have super views and sub views).

pros:

live coding
introspect on the development environment

cons:

hard to build an 'image' from scratch ("If you didn't already have an image, it would be very hard to create one from scratch." [4])
"Not file-based, so difficult to integrate with other build tools" [5]

opinions:

culture of using the built-in IDE turns off people who prefer other editors [6]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/711140/why-isnt-smalltalk-popular
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IfSmalltalkIsSoGoodWhyDoesNobodyUseIt
https://blog.robsayers.com/on-learning-smalltalk
- https://lobste.rs/s/qiteeh/on_learning_smalltalk
"...I have chafed at the Smalltalk environment, which has a...lack of familiar affordances. I have spent considerably more time trying to be useful with Smalltalk than any Wirth language, but it isn’t what I’m using today, so that kind of tells the whole story." -- [7]
https://eighty-twenty.org/2019/01/13/why-learn-smalltalk

kernel

"only six "keywords" are reserved in Smalltalk: true, false, nil, self, super, and thisContext... The only built-in language constructs are message sends, assignment, method return and literal syntax for some objects....The remainder of the language, including control structures for conditional evaluation and iteration, is implemented on top of the built-in constructs by the standard Smalltalk class library. (For performance reasons, implementations may recognize and treat as special some of those messages; however, this is only an optimization and is not hardwired into the language syntax.)

...

The adage that "Smalltalk syntax fits on a postcard" refers to a code snippet by Ralph Johnson, demonstrating all the basic standard syntactic elements of methods:[28][29]

exampleWithNumber: x

    true & false not & (nil isNil) ifFalse: [self halt].
    y := self size + super size.
    #($a #a 'a' 1 1.0)
        do: [ :each |
            Transcript show: (each class name);
                       show: ' '].
    ^x < y

" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Syntax