Squeak 6.1

113 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by fniephaus
(squeak.org)

60 Comments

avaer

4 hours ago

Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means.

I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum.

Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.

kitd

3 hours ago

For me, Smalltalk's "wow" moment was the concept of a persistently running image, with the developer's job being to mould and manipulate it into the shape s/he wants.

packetlost

2 hours ago

There are Lisps with similar semantics. It faded (further) out of popularity for a number of reasons, but it still has its niche.

Quitschquat

an hour ago

Which Lisps were those? I'm kinda interested in this space.

mike_ivanov

an hour ago

All Common Lisps can do that, though it is not a part of the standard. See e.g. (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die)

TheTaytay

an hour ago

I wish this didn’t go out of fashion as much as it did. An environment that you perturb makes more sense in a lot of ways than a “tear it down and restart” model.

fidotron

13 minutes ago

I think the gnarlier part is that it reveals how much (and how error prone) initialization code is. When objects start glued together in the right structure a lot becomes magically easier to deal with.

lilbigdoot

an hour ago

I'm considering this for my language but it's a lot more complex to implement (especially with today's ecosystems) and I keep wondering if it's worth it.

uncircle

3 hours ago

Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten.

All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.

konart

2 hours ago

And that's completely natural. Compare it with woodworking.

Yes, some people would dive deep into the craft and create works of art, exquisite furniture and tools they need to make it even better.

But those are the few. For the most of woodworkers this is just something they somehow learned to do on a level needed to be able to get a job and make living.

tvink

3 hours ago

Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder.

I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently.

Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.

sbuttgereit

an hour ago

From what I've seen... I think if I were writing business applications, I'd reach for Elixir... if I were writing something lower level like communication software, I'd reach for Erlang.

I have written a fair amount of Elixir (and targeting business applications) and I think Elixir's expressiveness lends itself well to making more abstract models of the business processes and data seen in solving business problems. However, writing Elixir I find you end up reading a lot of Erlang and in certain problem spaces I could imagine the appeal over Elixir. I could absolutely see where if I were writing more technically oriented programs.... programs closer to the hardware in some ways or programs designed to communicate with other programs (protocols, etc.) I could see Erlang as being a more clear and direct language in these circumstances.

All of this is very hand-wavy, but it's my impression.

ux266478

2 hours ago

For me, Elixir misses the mark. If you're an unc with a background in Ruby or that era of webdev, I can see the appeal. It's a familiar set dressing. I don't have that background, I much prefer the syntactic structure of Erlang's psuedo-horn clauses. Both for similar familiarity reasons (I knew Prolog before I touched Erlang), as well as a general preference for the simplicity.

uncircle

an hour ago

The similarity of Ruby and Elixir is only extremely superficial and betrays your lack of familiarity with the language.

ux266478

18 minutes ago

I didn't imply otherwise, nor is the story different on the Erlang-Prolog axis (actually it's even more pronounced there.) I literally called it "set dressing". Where I think you go off the rails is that you're conflating surface-level things with irrelevance. Which isn't really true, especially in matters of taste.

I find this to be a very strange thing to get defensive about. It's not exactly a subtle part of Elixir's history. It was pretty well documented to be born out of the creator's dissatisfaction with concurrency in Ruby, and simultaneously, for a more Ruby-like language on the BEAM. That doesn't mean it's literally Ruby-on-the-BEAM (which was originally attempted, and didn't work out), however mistaking that as cause to dismiss the link between the two and the carry-over appeal for developers is an unsound overcorrection.

phplovesong

37 minutes ago

Elixir brings mostly a new syntax, and little more. I rather use Gleam IF i really need to use the BEAM.

Other than that, vanilla Erlang is THE way to go.

ux266478

3 hours ago

I find that lamentation a bit funny, because the list in practice is never really complete. For instance, you forgot the mighty Prolog. Surely, tcl belongs on there too.

Qem

2 hours ago

Also SNOBOL/Icon.

uncircle

an hour ago

I blame the unknown unknowns. I don’t haven’t learned Prolog yet. Alas, enlightenment still eludes me.

(Agreed that TCL is pretty cool)

andsoitis

2 hours ago

And Prolog and Assembly!

uncircle

14 minutes ago

Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.

sebastianconcpt

44 minutes ago

And some months ago I was flirting with the idea of "Smalltalk and Erlang had a baby" and have Smalltalk syntax to an actor environment ran by a Erlang VM style. Plus some insanely cool ideas about a causal debugger for distributed bugs.

The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.

Although, thinking long term and for understendabilitymaxxin and reliabilitymaxxin it might still be worth having something like that.

Since Smalltalk can be so close to english and Erlang VM so reliable, humans and LLMs should thrive on it.

gliall_err

36 minutes ago

Metalworking, lathes, precision tooling, are all way more valuable skills and tools today than they ever were before the industrial revolution.

I suspect that over time a good grasp of fundamentals and great tooling will only get more valuable in software as well as automation expands, in whichever form.

Automation expands the demand for skills. It can never diminish it. Required variety indicates that complexity doesn't go away with automation, and at some level someone will have to understand and make decisions about complex issues. You can't automate all the way down. Or, put another way, everything is already automated all the way down. The expansion of automation as we perceive it is merely the growth of complexity over new dimensions.

Or put a third way: automation means two different things: constraint and liberty. The confusion arising from not discerning which one is in force makes it seems like one can grow unbounded. Liberty requires constraint and vice versa.

addaon

4 hours ago

> almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk

Is this underselling the role of Self in JS’s prototype-based object system, or saying that a prototype-based object system is not one of the good parts?

sscaryterry

4 hours ago

Prototypical inheritance has caused so many, many vulnerabilities...

WillAdams

2 hours ago

I would give a lot for a version of Squeak which could instantiate standard GUI controls and easily compile to a stand-alone binary or HTML page w/ included JavaScript.

rahoulb

an hour ago

I didn't understand programming at all until I read about (not even tried) Smalltalk. And it's because of Smalltalk I write Ruby today.

My favourite thing about it is the lack of "reserved words" - just a handful of punctuation marks. It's incredibly pure - almost all of the syntax is "send this message to this object".

vanderZwan

26 minutes ago

> Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.

That's E and Self erasure.

throwatdem12311

2 hours ago

As a Ruby developer this video about Pharo smalltalk made me a smalltalk believer — not surprising because Ruby was heavily inspired by smalltalk.

https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o

Fervicus

3 minutes ago

Thanks for sharing. This piqued my interest.

kar1181

30 minutes ago

If you think of it as message oriented it makes so much more sense.

bowsamic

2 hours ago

The main thing you’ll learn is that actually the static and inflexible abstractions of an operating system do a lot to protect the system integrity and prevent everything from blowing up. Many smalltalk VMs rely on recovery features for a reason

codesnik

2 hours ago

recovery features? how do they work? and what smalltalk runtime do you have in mind? I still have a very vague understanding on how changes could be applied to a production running images, or if there is one and preferable way to do that.

ramesh31

4 hours ago

>Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.

Like what, exactly? I'm genuinely curious. There is no root object or message passing in JS, and the OO aspects are only incidentally bolted on (classes don't actually exist, prototypal inheritance was an afterthought), named params are newer sugar, and polymorphism is a struggle due to all of the above. I've always thought of JS as what Crockford himself said: "a Lisp in C's clothing".

tl

3 hours ago

Ignore the syntax for a moment. Minus Javascript, HTML + CSS is a green screen terminal with better fonts and image support. Message passing (fetch, XMLHttpRequest, polling, streaming, etc...) is how you build something that feels like a real tool out a system where the sandbox gets in the way of everything you want to hold locally.

Smalltalker-80

2 hours ago

I agree, but JS has evolved so far, that when using TypeScript, you can mostly ignore the underlying mismatch.

tvink

3 hours ago

A big influence for modern js is chained enumeration, like forEach

Decabytes

an hour ago

one thing I love about Smalltalk is being able to inspect the code as it's running. Especially from the GUI. You can just be like Oh I wonder where the code for this button is from, inspect it, and it takes you right to the code. It's a shame we can't have this level of introspection without negative performance implications.

eitland

an hour ago

We could in Java Swing (and Visual basic, but lets not talk about that) as well. Well, not runtime, but we could design applications and just right click on the objects in the IDE and go directly to the click (or double click or right click) handlers.

Then again, not having to disable this for runtime is a feature if you ask me.

Yes, current web applications are prettier and easier to upgrade but we lost a lot on the way wrt developer experience and ux.

broswell

an hour ago

I just downloaded on Windows 11. My antivirus (Symantec Endpoint Protection) did not like it and erased the executable. I reinstalled and got it working.

Question? Does this work with Etoys? If so, how? I tried following various directions online without success. Thanks!

goodthink

18 minutes ago

Help/Useful Expressions has some EToys instructions. The Squeakland images stopped getting upograded when Squeeak went 64-bit (I think). You can get a "halo" on any object, click the Inspector icon (the eye) and create an etoys script from there. Also, under Extras/Themes and Colors there is a Set Etoys Mode option. You can try that but, it didn't work last night. Lastly, files.squeak.org/etoys has a 6.0beta image you can download. Drop the image/changes into SqueakJS [1] (that is the only way to run a 32bit image).

[1]https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS

brabel

3 hours ago

How does this compare to Glamorous Toolkit[1]?

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

efficax

an hour ago

Glamorous Toolkit is built on Pharo, which I think is a fork of Squeak or shares lineage with it.

ioasuncvinvaer

3 hours ago

It's not about AI

brabel

2 hours ago

Are you joking? GTK is not about AI either (though yeah they put LLMs in it if you want), it's another Smalltalk environment.

atemerev

4 hours ago

And after all these years, still no fixes for high-DPI displays. The UI is still pixely and slow. Perhaps I should take Fable and try myself, this was the only bug I cared about and it is not solved after 10 years at least.

sswezey

4 hours ago

Same, I've been tracking this and Pharo for high-DPI fixes. Pharo is working on a new graphics stack that is intended to address this as well, but until then no high-DPI support.

sczi

an hour ago

Does Glamorous Toolkit work for you? It's pharo with a different rust based GUI stack, and some batteries included for making custom inspector views and such. I don't have a high DPI display so I'm not completely confident, but my understanding is that their rust based GUI works fine with high DPI.

mparrett

4 hours ago

I see some movement on high-DPI in the latest release. What are the current gaps? I'm not familiar with the project, just curious.

> Improves high-DPI support for buttons, scroll panes, sliders, menus, multi-selection lists, trees, drop-shadows, the scratch pad, the keyboard exerciser, and others.

https://squeak.org/release_notes/6.1/#:~:text=and%20dialog%2...

sswezey

4 hours ago

I opened the Squeak image on my Mac, and everything looks good that I checked.

AdmiralAsshat

3 hours ago

The UI has been a huge impediment in my getting into Squeak development. Every couple years I decide I will try it again, and then see that very little has changed.

It's a shame. Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo was supposed to be the future, but it feels like an IDE stuck in the 90's.

pmkary

an hour ago

Use the Glamorous Toolkit.