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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Alan Kay is brilliant, but to be completely fair, if Squeak is the way forward, I think I'm happy where I am. It's not bad, but the tradeoffs are such that it's hard to imagine ever using it for production software.

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Note: Squeak/Smalltalk were revolutionary at the time and influenced many of the modern languages we use today. The way forward isn't to use Squeak/Smalltalk (which Alan also wanted to kill off), it's to be inspired by their ideas, embrace the good, rework the bad and to build something better.

Yes. Smalltalk was a work of genius. It seems like every good idea in modern languages I learn about turns out to have been poached from either Smalltalk or Lisp.

Every use Objective-C? It's pretty much Smalltalk with C backwards compatibility.

I've been using Objective-C for about 12 years now. It is similar to Smalltalk in its message system and naming conventions — which, to be fair, were at the core of Kay's Smalltalk vision — but otherwise the experience of programming in Objective-C is not much like programming in Squeak.

That is no bad thing, because programming in Squeak absolutely blows programming in Xcode away.

It's Smalltalk but without the image, without browsers, without inspectors, without live objects, without...

Well... you get it...

If you're interested in seeing what Objective-C would be like with a more Smalltalky environment, you might find F-Script interesting.

"but to be completely fair, if Squeak is the way forward, I think I'm happy where I am."

Well, it's still the language from the year 1980. The very fact that you judge a 1980-vintage system as "not bad" compared to existing alternatives is telling in itself. Alan is working on a 2010 version even as we speak. :-)

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