Snap!Con 2021 - Smalltalk: Why all the fuss?

Short Talk by Bernat Romagosa

Inspired by Logo, Smalltalk is a programming language and environment originally designed for children at Xerox PARC in the 1970s with the clear vision that computers should be graphical and fully programmable. It became the birthplace of so many ideas that we identify as universal computer concepts nowadays, such as desktops, object orientation, overlapping windows, dropdown menus or icons.

Since Scratch was initially developed in Smalltalk, and being Jens Mönig a Smalltalk developer himself, many of its ideas permeated into Snap!, and more are sure to come further down the line.

In this live demonstration we will take a look at Smalltalk and we will try to convey what makes this environment so powerful and revolutionary, even 50 years after it was first conceived.

[micknamens]

There is more than just objects. There is the message sending action (not the message itself), variable reading and writing, performing primitive operatings (like adding two small integers), creating an instance, returning the result value back to the message sender. All these dynamic actions include and effect objects, but are not objects themselves. The dynamics is what defines live vs. dead matter.

[micknamens]

Actually the isPalindrome predicate should be also defined for String. Then the method implementation in Integer can use this String method.

[Kenbomp]

Pharo also has version control built in. Easily. Nice showing of what it can do

[Modinthalis]

Very cool, nice to see someone passionate about their craft. It's a pity that we usually don't get to pick our favourite languages for paid work.

[micknamens]

In organisms there are cells, but no classes in the form of objects, rather in the form of genes, i.e. segments of the genetic information (analogue to the byte code in methods). So maybe prototype based languages are more natural then OOP?