Saturday, July 6, 2002

The Story of Squeak There's a very fascinating paper describing the history of Squeak and how it was implemented. The most interesting part is that the actual VM is written in Smalltalk and then translated into C for performance. There is a small amount of native OS C code required, but the vast majority is written in Smalltalk. That is very cool and explains why it's been ported to so many platforms, including a large number of PDAs. I don't think it's particularly useful for commercial development, but as a research platform it looks really interesting. 10:46:15 PM

Squeak is Cool Tonight as part of my research work I spent a few hours playing around with the Squeak smalltalk environment. Talk about fascinating. I've looked at squeak a couple times in the past, but never spent more then a couple minutes playing with it. The initial impression is just of a really weird and klunky environment, but if you take the time to explore it really is very cool. It kind of reminds me of a chemistry set or one of those electronics kits you can buy at Radio Shack for building simple circuits, except this is for object oriented software. I remember reading in Dealers of Lightening that when Alan Kay invented Smalltalk that was basically his intention and I definitely see it. I also really see why people who use Smalltalk tend to get addicted to it and why they bitch about Java. Of course I still wonder how useful it is for real applications, but it sure is a pretty cool environment for experimentation. I'm looking forward to learning about it in more depth. 12:09:03 AM