On 3/15/07, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale / gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/15/07, Robert Dober <robert.dober / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It might be noteworthy though that the Squeak folks *are* the original
> > developers of Smalltalk.
>
> Well Dan Ingalls was one of the Squeak developers, and the first
> Smalltalk implementer.  He actually amazed Alan Kay when he showed him
> an actuall implementation of the ideas which Alan had sketched out on
> a single sheet of paper.  If I'm not mistaken Dan's first Smaltalk
> interpreter was written in Basic of all things, but he carried it
> through many significant stages including Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76
> and Smalltalk-80.  The last I heard Dan was working for Sun on Java,
> although still making contributions to Squeak.
>
> Another main contributor to Squeak is/was John Maloney who's a bit too
> young to be an original Smalltalk contributer.  John was a student of
> Alan Borning at the University of Washinton. Borning had built a
> constraint-based simulation system in Smalltalk named Thinglab.  John
> (along with Bjorn Freeman-Benson) built a more generalized
> constraint-based system called Thinglab II as doctoral students under
> Borning.
>
> And of course Alan Kay was involved as well, Squeak started while he
> was an Apple Fellow, and continued with funding from Disney when he
> became a Disney Fellow. I suspect that Alan's major role was as a
> idea/spark generator, cheerleader and user of Squeak for his
> multi-media simulation projects with kids.
>
> My first encounter with Squeak came at OOPSLA many years ago.  It was
> about the time when Java was really starting to take the wind out of
> Smaltalk's sails, probably more do to the fact that IBM and ParcPlace
> Digitalk were charging big bucks for Smalltalk implementations while
> Java could be had for free as long as you accepted Sun's licensing
> terms.

Ah I think you are spot on here, and it is nice to see how the open
source spiral worked. Smalltalk was closed, Java was free as in beer
than Smalltalk become open and now Java is as I learned in this
honored place.

Well there are major influences for that which have nothing to do with
Smalltalk but it is still nice to see.
>
> As I recall, John Maloney invited me to a birds-of-a-feather session.
> I walked into the room to find all these Smalltalkers huddled together
> marveling over the constraint based Morphic MVC framework, and Dan's
> music synthesis code. I had the impression that we were like the
> Christians hiding out in the catacombs while the Romans(Java drinkers)
> were having their orgies outside. <G>

This is all great stuff, I'll just post to the Squeak ML to subscribe
to the Ruby ML if they have any questions ;)
> --
> Rick DeNatale
>
> My blog on Ruby
> http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
>
>

Cheers
Robert
-- 
You see things; and you say Why?
But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
-- George Bernard Shaw