The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
worrydream.com122 points by _reza a day ago
122 points by _reza a day ago
A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).
This is a good history:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-deep-history-of-your-ap...
Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar, Interlisp-D inside Xerox.
Mesa and Cedar influenced Niklaus Wirth to come up with Modula-2/Lillith and Oberon.
Which had an influence on Rob Pike, on how he developed ACME for Plan 9.
Meanwhile StrongTalk, and Objective-C ended up influencing how Java came to be, and its approach to JIT compilation.
On another track Smalltalk ends up influencing Self design, which ends up having an effect on how V8 JIT was designed.
Then there is Ruby as well.
Pity that with all of this, many still never tried what actually means to use Smalltalk.
Note that Interface Builder started as a Lisp prototype, before being acquired by NeXT.
https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...
I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.
The development experience while using the environment, the debugger, edit-compile-continue, REPL with suggestions for typos, dynamic code loading.
I should made myself clear it wasn't the programming languages grammar or semantics by themselves.
All of that was common in MACLISP (MIT) and InterLISP (BBN) before PARC was founded. It was part of the lineage Alan talked about when founding PARC. DWIM was Teitelman’s PhD thesis (BTW his advisor was Minsky, which seems odd today but was normal back then).
Rochus and I were arguing about this a couple of weeks ago, and I read through a bunch of historical papers, including Teitelbaum talking about how Smalltalk influenced Interlisp-D and Lampson more or less attributing the GUI to Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
I had no idea about the Interface Builder Lisp history! Thank you for digging that up!
The LeLisp version of Interface Builder that JMH wrote at INRIA predates the timeline in your link.
That link is the official story I am aware of, where can I read about that one?
I have a paper copy of a paper (in French) about SOS Interface. Had scans of this at one point.
There is a bit more of a timeline in a talk [1] he gave at INRIA a couple of years before he died.
[1] https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
Mesa and Cedar interested me as I got into programming languages, but I was more into Trellis/Owl (and had copies of the documentation provided to me by DEC SRC after I wrote to them).
Trellis/Owl, now that's a trip down memory lane. Kilian's paper on the compiler was my entry point into doing databases for the last ~30 years, for odd reasons.
> Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar
In what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?
You and I already went through this discussion at great length two weeks ago, and I came up with lots of sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
Mesa and Cedar are both programming languages which have nothing in common with Smalltalk. Cedar is also a later development environment. The original post was about Smalltalk vs. Objective-C, i.e. a language comparison, and then mentioning some graphic tools as well. Thus the comment I responded to was ambiguous in different respects. That's why I asked. It has nothing to do with the discussion you referenced.
The Xerox papers on digital archive, I can try to hunt them down, see for example the one on XDE Tajo experience for Mesa.
MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.
Yes my claim is about the IDE experience shared across all Xerox PARC environments, and how it affected the design of each language individually.
I will hunt down the papers.
We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
> I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
You should be, because I spent hours telling you about it, in detail, with citations and extensive quotes from the designers of the Alto and Bravo, less than two weeks ago. At the time you conceded the point and said it was not what you intended to dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
> I spent hours telling you about it
I hope not.
And please note that this is again a different topic.
Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.
Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.
If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/Xerox_PARC_sour..., or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.