More history and Smalltalk

The sorry state we are in today with regard to the tiny amount of usefulness in the www is due to the disinclination of most computer people to (a) deal with big ideas, and (b) to learn about the really big and important ideas in our not so distant past.
Alan Kay

From: the history of associations

I cannot recommend enough Jimmy Maher’s excellent series of blog posts on the history of computing. Even though I’ve caught snippets of the history he covers over my lifetime (and tons more from The New Media Reader), he does an excellent job telling the stories.

What recently led me back to the history was some off-hand comment about a modern implementation of Smalltalk: Pharo. Although I associated the name with Xerox PARC, and the GUI that was the inspiration for Apple Lisa and Mac, I was always under the impression that it was just -merely- a programming language (especially given that Objective C, the language used for the past 25 years at Apple was described as a mix of Smalltalk and C). I now realize how wrong that impression was.

I’ve been giving serious consideration to Pharo being the development language/environment for Lexiator. So far most of my effort has been on understanding what Smalltalk really is, and how Pharo manifests it. And I know that I’ll have to play around with it to really get a sense of how it works. I see a lot of promise in the community that’s developing it, and the direction they’re taking it. Given all that I’ve learned about the environment, I certainly can’t dismiss it out-of-hand just because it isn’t as popular as Python.

What I find really interesting is how the idea of using Smalltalk (Pharo) would more strongly link Lexiator to the idealistic/hopeful period of computer history that was lost and (mostly) forgotten due to a myriad of reasons, and left us with our current “sorry state” that is so far from the trajectory that could’ve happened.

Addition:

I didn’t want to create a new post just to express some concerns and ideas that I have with using Smalltalk. Currently, Pharo is the version of Smalltalk that seems to have the most active development–with major releases once a year. It even has a small consortium of businesses behind it that are actually funding engineers. Be that as it may, my main concerns are that it currently isn’t straight forward to strip out the unnecessary parts of the image when deploying an application. Although, they are working on that. From online videos, I see that they’re making progress on the UI, working to incorporate native widgets (which, actually, I don’t think is necessary) while also working to strip out the GUI code from the VM (which currently looks horrendous on a HiDPI display).

On the ideas front: Reading over some of Alan Kay’s contemporaneous material (and online posts recently) has made me wonder about an additional “merging” of the everything-is-an-object interface with the data that makes up Lexiator. More specifically, is it possible to represent the lexias (ideas/text/whatever) as objects themselves, instead of just data. Now, strictly speaking (from my understanding), data in Smalltalk is always an object. But all of the examples I’ve seen so far are more discrete and manageable. How would a paragraph or sentence be constructed from data that is an object? What does that even mean? What would it mean, in Smalltalk parlance, to send a message to a sentence or a picture? What actions could it perform?

I currently have no idea what to make of the above questions, or even how to begin to answer them. However, there are at least a couple of the goals of Lexiator that would seem to benefit from a data-as-object representation: synthesizing new knowledge from other pieces (building a larger/newer/different structure from smaller pieces/objects/knowledge), and finding or linking knowledge that’s already there. The latter idea being that if the knowledge itself is “alive”, then one doesn’t have to run queries in a database to find those links, the lexias themselves would do the job. Obviously, I don’t currently know how that would work, but it’s an interesting idea: to have the lexias be living objects inside the same application that you’re using to manipulate them.