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Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by dilap on Thursday December 17, 2020 @08:31PM (#25462768)
I've been reading about Smalltalk and Squeak for years and only just now realized the relationship between their names.

Anyway... My only real exposure to Smalltalk was via obj-c. That combination of simple languages was truly amazing in terms of its power/complexity ratio.

I'm not doing native iOS dev anymore, but from a distance, it's a little sad for me to see how much of radical departure Swift is from that simplicity...

Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by galaxyLogic on Friday December 18, 2020 @01:11AM (#25464369)
I wonder if the name Smalltalk was inspired by the name "Lisp". Lisp is away of talking, so is small talk. Maybe creators of ST-80 desired to create something higher level, more human-like than "lisp".
Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by gjvc on Friday December 18, 2020 @09:44AM (#25467541)
This really is a potentially very misleading bit of uninformed speculation.

"LISP" gets its name from "list processor".

"Smalltalk" gets its name from the the fact that the language came from the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC -- the "small" was thus meant as an acknowledgement of the study that how children learn was crucial to the design of the Smalltalk system, and the "talk" relates to the fact that objects "talk" to one other by messaging.

Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by canadian_tired on Friday December 18, 2020 @10:21AM (#25467905)
LISP: We were told Lots (of) Insignificant Stupid Parentheses.
Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by pjmlp on Friday December 18, 2020 @02:05AM (#25464582)
If you dive into the history of Xerox PARC workstations, you will find similar developer experiences for Lisp (Interlisp-D), Mesa (XDE) and Mesa/Cedar.

The graphical debugger, dynamic code loading, bytecodes with microcoded CPU configured on boot, REPL with access to the whole OS, the way OS, libraries and applications blend together, all there across all those language stacks.

Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by dpraburaj on Friday December 18, 2020 @09:18AM (#25467268)
Doesn't look like it although Alan Kay has expressed admiration for Lisp in many places.

> As for hype: Another motive for "smalltalk" was the practice at the time of naming operating, and other, systems (which hardly did anything) after mighty indo-european gods, such as Thor, Zeus, Odin, etc. I figured that if Smalltalk ever did something neat, then people would be pleasantly surprised.

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/50.

Re:The Smalltalk Zoo by joubert on Friday December 18, 2020 @02:09AM (#25464595)
Lisp stands for “list processor”.