The Evolution of Smalltalk from Smalltalk-72 to Squeak [video]

In November 1972, Alan Kay gave an inspiring seminar at MIT

on Smalltalk-72. There were ongoing discussions during the weeks after the lecture about the following:

    Dennis and van Horn capabilities 
    Petri nets
    Smalltalk-72
    Simula, which was strangely very different from Smalltalk-72 
    the Internet
    etc.) 

efforts, we realized that

there is a single abstraction that provided the foundation

for all of computation which it was decided to name the

"Actors Abstraction". The Actors Paradigm covers all of

digital computation and consequently is more powerful than

Church/Turing Paradigm.

     Although the use of bitmap displays with Smalltak-72 
     was very impressive, Smalltalk-72 left a great deal to 
     be desired as a programming language.  
     Later Smalltalk designs were completely 
     different because they adopted the Simula class 
     hierarchy instead of the byte stream interpreter of 
     Smalltalk72

programming language. Instead computation should be

defined axiomatically in terms of fundamental concepts including

       Actors
       Computational Events
       Partial order on computational events
       Regions of mutual exclusion
       Event induction as the foundation for proving properties of Actors Systems

using the Actors Abstraction:

https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003

https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3459566

Also, see the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI

Dart 1.0 Optional Types runtime checks

Dart 2.0 Mandatory Types (sound null-safe type system) static checks + runtime checks.

A simple example of Newspeak and literate programming: https://newspeaklanguage.org/samples/Literate/Literate.html

The IDE works in a similar way to the Squeak-based IDE, but there is no image and being hosted in a browser has other limitations. This isn't a language you are going to use to make a quick and dirty CRUD app (although I have) but it is an interesting example of how Smalltalk concepts can be used in a web-based world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I, on the other hand, consider Self and Slate to be good examples of Smalltalk.

Beyond any technical discussions there is the marketing issue. Smalltalk's reputation took a major hit in the 1990s with the rise of Java (from the "language of the future that doesn't run on the computers you have, yet" it became "a failed language of the past") and association with the name can hurt a project in some cases.

This, precisely. Pharo is a fork of Squeak Smalltalk, and Squeak Smalltalk is a direct descendant of Smalltalk-80.

(And a common thread in Smalltalk implementations and versions from Smalltalk-72 to Squeak is the illustrious Dan Ingalls.)

Still, Smalltalk has nothing on Lisp or BASIC in terms of dialects/variants/versions. ;-)

Here is a recent talk he gave about it:

https://vimeo.com/ukstug

In the case of Newspeak, I only would edit the raw source code if I had no other way to do it. It is so much easier and ergonomic to use the Newspeak IDE to view and modify the code, with the live debugger, object introspection and all the advantages that the IDE gives you. The recent addition of exemplars, where working fragments of the code are part of the documentation, is especially nice.