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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

In what sense is Smalltalk smaller than Lisp?

Heck, I don't know!

I just wish these languages preserved their sense of ingenuity and wonder, before putting on the iron maidens of their frameworks.

I wish there was a C for children, but explaining indirect addressing and the evolution of indexed pointers is a bridge too far.

Having read the book Dealers of Lightning about Xerox PARC and Kay,I think Smalltalk 72 was the original smaller simple language, with which children were taught.

Then others at Xerox added more professional stuff, the kind programmers would want, which resulted in Smalltalk 76 and so on. These were not as approachable for children anymore allegedly.

Nowadays there's Squeak which is a Smalltalk implementation, which influenced Scratch I think (first version of Scratch was written in Squeak).

Search the internet for Adam Kay's documents on Squeak and educating children, helps to put on context what he had in mind (if you, like me, just install Squeak and expect a stunning tutorial... it's not like that, at least I didn't find).

Kay also said, having an IDE only takes you to the 70s from the 60s too... So there's work to be done yet.

There's even a pretty fun documentary on the Squeak project, with Seymour Papert, Alan, and Jerome Bruner. [0] Or, if you want to go further back, read the original "Personal Dynamic Media" papers.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndkW61OUA20

Smalltalk only has 6 keywords and everything is done via sending messages to objects. How many language constructs and keywords does Lisp have?

Ultimately different philosophies are at work. Smalltalk makes many objects and has the power to introspect on them (classes are also objects), Lisp has facilities to introspect and do meta programming using macros, making new keywords, so of course the language will grow. That is the whole point. Growing a language for solving specific problems. Smalltalk makes new objects instead.

R5RS Scheme? It's not so big. Common Lisp, OTOH...

I think the OP is referring to the pseudo-variables, true, false, nil, self, super, and thisContext:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Syntax

I don’t think they count.

If we’re counting small numbers, Lisp also has a small number of “keywords”, nine:

    quote atom eq 
    cons car cdr 
    lambda label define

Others put this number at five or seven. I guess you can express define as a function of label and lambda, so you drop to eight, but I don’t know how you get to seven, let alone five.

Cons, car and cdr can be defined in terms of lambda, though it's not exactly an efficient implementation:

  (define (cons x y)
    (lambda (f)
      (f x y)))

  (define (car c)
    (c (lambda (x y) x)))

  (define (cdr c)
    (c (lambda (x y) y)))

Efficient or not, it's very pretty, I love its self-referential house-of-cardiness :)

Not sure how Smalltalk measures up in that regard, but wouldn't one also need to count things like define-syntax and all things, which are built-in for defining macros? I guess that would only be fair, because that gets Lisps up to the same power level as Smalltalk with its introspection and ability to create classes at runtime, since they are objects as well.

Then there are things like "What is the syntax for a vector?" and all kinds of reader syntax with "# + something", depending on the dialect/specific lisp language, I guess.

EDIT: Found this: https://wiki.c2.com/?SmalltalkSyntaxInaPostcard

Gah, silly me -- I forgot 'cond'!

Just throw that into the list, and ditch define.

The claim in the quote is that Smalltalk is the simplest, not the smallest. That may only beg the question, but yay clarity.

If we still had a language as simple as Logo, but as powerful to express objects to a young mind, would be a beautiful thing.

We should strive for such simplicity.

Wren seems pretty simple to me: https://wren.io/

Lua? Seems to be working fine in stuff for young people, e.g. Roblox.

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