Yet another Hacker News

The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)

54 points _reza 2 hours ago 11 comments

wslh 1 hour ago | parent

Just yesterday I was talking with a friend who works at Instantiations [1]. They were founded in 1988, and still ship a new release every year of Smalltalk. What I find fascinating is that customers are actively building on it and seem happy.

[1] https://www.instantiations.com/

WillAdams 1 hour ago | parent

I really wish that there was a license/version/build marketed to hobbyists:

>Call or Email for Pricing

and the upgrade pricing is four figures (per set per year I'm guessing?).

Ages ago, I actually bought a Smalltalk for Windows compiler, but never got around to doing anything with it (which I regret) --- I suppose I should try Dolphin SmallTalk....

Paradigm2020 32 minutes ago | parent

Dad is true Smalltalk believer, used to use visual age, instantiations etc but is a happy user of pharo nowadays which is free, opensource and under active development so could give that one a try.

mwnorman2 1 hour ago | parent

Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!

The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!

Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?

CrimsonRain 1 hour ago | parent

You're not a horrible person to enjoy that. However, the schadenfreude is only in your head. 2026 is the most amazing year of building software in human history, so far.

gobdovan 36 minutes ago | parent

Well, programming feels that it will get closer Smalltalk. For webdev you get pretty mature HMR, you look at the interface and sometimes just point at things and tell a model to modify it. So pretty close to live medium +short feedback loops.

If the big labs wouldn't have the incentive of hiding the code and making you rely solely on the models, you'd probably also see more inspection tools and contextual changes when the model does them.

rootnod3 1 hour ago | parent

I for one already have the popcorn at the ready. Can't wait for it.

pjmlp 56 minutes ago | parent

Blame IBM and other Smalltalk vendors.

They were the ones that almost on day one pivoted their Smalltalk offerings into Java.

Eclipse still has the Visual Age Smalltalk object browser.

If you look into OS/2 documentation, and SOM (OS/2 version of COM), you will find out Smalltalk on OS/2 had a role similar to .NET on Windows.

I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.

slowin 1 hour ago | parent

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...

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

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...

rjsw 38 minutes ago | parent

The LeLisp version of Interface Builder that JMH wrote at INRIA predates the timeline in your link.