> Dan Ingalls was the John Carmack...Kay was the Romero.

Sorry, I don't get the metaphor. It's a reference to a game I think?, but not sure which one, and I could be wrong. I'm very familiar with Ingalls and Kay, but not the other two, besides hearing Carmack's name around here sometimes.

Romero was the "frontman" for Id Software (Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake) back in the 90s. He gave the magazine interviews, attracted the hype, and claimed much of the credit for the game's success, at least in the popular press.

Carmack was the programmer who wrote the core bits that made the game possible. He didn't engage with the popular press, and when he did engage in discussions with the media or with fans, it was at a very deep and technical level.

You may also think about it in terms of Wozniak and Jobs. Point being that Alan Kay was out there, engaging the press and talking about Smalltalk's big ideas (objects, messaging, computers as medium, how they relate to children, etc.). He was the frontman. Whereas Dan Ingalls deserves the bulk of the credit for actually writing Smalltalk.

Fun fact: Ingalls wrote early Smalltalk versions... in BASIC.

Fun source for "in BASIC" ?

It's on page 4 of this article: "I immediately went home myself and wrote a simulation of Alan’s interpreter in Basic (the only language to which I had easy access at home), as a proof of concept." (referring to Smalltalk-72)

Now I will have to read it :-)

Thank you!

On the off-chance this isn't a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

Ok thanks. No, it's not a joke. Don't know why you would think that. I'm getting strong signals here that Carmack/Romero are supposed to be a lot better known than Ingalls/Kay. Even though this is a Smalltalk discussion! (I've never been that much into computer games, besides occasionally writing them, and have always loathed "first-person shooter" games. Maybe that explains something.)