More
on documentation about Squeak and Smalltalk
The generally best way to get useful
documentation about Squeak and Smalltalk is become a member of a
relevant maillist. For Squeak, THE maillist is the developers' list,
which is quite lively and interesting, and on which there is a lot of
daily traffic. As far as I know it also is the Smalltalk list that is
most active (but I may be mistaken).
The reason this works quite well -
with some patience - is that there are quite a few people on those
maillists with similar or related interests, who will throw up
references or links that may be of interest to you.
Here is one I found interesting
about Smalltalk and Squeak:
<http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/xerox/alto/Smalltalk72_Manual.pdf>
This is a pdf file of the original
manual of 1976 by Alan Kay and Adele Robinson for Smalltalk 72. It is
a download of 5.8 MB and is a neat file that also shows the curling of
the original typed paper copy it reproduces.
And it seems much of this Smalltalk
72 still can run inside Squeak, and it is interesting to see how much
material has been copied (more or less) again and again in the
Smalltalk documentation.
Thus, "joe the box" that
last appeared in Mark Guzdial's 2001 book on Squeak to my knowledge
first appeared in this Smalltalk 72 manual.
Two reasons why I found this
interesting are that this manual apparently started the animistic style
of talking about Smalltalk (which I find generally deplorable, but can
be defended as useful in case one is introducing very naive
"children of all ages" to Smalltalk), and that the manual
shows how much continuity there is from Smalltalk 1972 to Squeak 2002.
And I find this manual much better
than "Smalltalk 80" (the book by Goldberg and Robinson), for
it has a higher code : text ratio, and the English, if at places too
animistic for my tastes, is better. By my lights it certainly is a
much better introduction to programming than is "Smalltalk
80". This manual is
definitely recommended for anyone interested in Smalltalk, if only to
see how much has changed and how much has remained the same.
What has changed: In 1976 there was
a stronger use of icons such as for turtles, for return and assign (as
in Squeak), for recognising text and more; Smalltalk contained an
explicit implication, and for/while/repeat loops; the grammar was less
elegant; and there were few or none of the current tools like
browsers.
What has remained the same: It is
quite recognisably Smalltalk (in diapers); the windowing approach that
since has taken over the world by way of Apple and Windows was already
in place in 1976; and some of the examples in this text have been
repeated in adapted formats in most books introducing Smalltalk.
And I might have read it without
noticing it, but the words "polymorphism",
"encapsulation" and "inheritance" do not seem to
occur in this text.
Finally, it is nice to see the manual
that was behind the stuff
that so much impressed Steve Jobs and much influenced the GUIs that
made Apple and Windows famous and it is interesting to see both how
much was already in place in 1976 and how much has since been added.
Here is another very nice
piece of documentation for those interested in the history of
Smalltalk:
< http://www.metaobject.com/papers/SmallHistory.pdf
>
This was written by Alan Kay in he
the early nineties. It gives a lot of background and insight
into the people and processes that produced Smalltalk and it is
well-written.
It's almost 4 MB and the only
problem is that in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 I had to flip pages and take some
care with scrolling to read it through in the right order
Maarten
Maartensz
Feb 18, 2002
