gokr

Perhaps you are aware of who Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Ian etc are, but... anyway, I just wanted to chip in with some context for those who are not aware. Alan Kay led the creation and development of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, thus creating the first real GUI introducing all the UX elements we today take for granted (windows, buttons etc - yes, the same that Steve Jobs got a demo of), establishing OOP (some would argue Simula was first, but Smalltalk took it 10x further) and much, much more. So his legacy in the world of computing is... legendary I would argue, just google him.

Now, Ian has done truly brilliant VM JIT work in the Smalltalk community and I suspect that Ian did a lot of the DSL related stuff in STEPS, like the TCPIP stack etc.

So this is not just some "random folks" :) and.. some of the most brilliant work comes when you are really not sure where you are going. The original Smalltalk work that gave us OOP and modern GUIs came from Alan's life long task of making computers usable by children in order to amplify education. Most would argue we are still struggling with that task ;) but at least we got a lot of other things out of it!

It all depends if you consider basically all non web GUIs developed the last 40 years or if you limit yourself to reactive web UIs developed the last few years. Tongue in cheek :)

Sure, reactive frameworks in js that mainly operate on the DOM/HTML/CSS stack may be very little OO, but Swift/Dart/Kotlin are OOP languages and Flutter for example, while using a reactive model, is still 100% OOP with Widget classes in a composition and so on.

"hated all around the world" sounds a bit harsh :) Sure, lots of people like "throwing hate" at it, but AFAICT it's mostly "bad use" that gets people riled up like insane deep inheritance or overly complicated frameworks. Also, it seems especially young guns feel cool by claiming FP is superior ;)

AFAIK OOP languages are still ruling the whole GUI space, which is reasonable since GUI was the main driving force behind it (see history of Smalltalk) and the domain is such an obvious candidate for composition of separate independent elements. What languages are primarily used for GUIs today? Java, C#, Swift, ObjC, C++, Dart, Kotlin ... and the list can probably be made much longer.

On the web ... well.

Smalltalk is a family of dialects and implementations. Most of them are indeed compiled to bytecode which is then executed by a JIT VM. Most of them use the "image" concept where you are always in runtime like in a classic Lisp, and yes, the VM handles shape changes etc etc. But some Smalltalks actually have other characteristics, like non JIT or even compiling via C (Smalltalk/X does that I believe).

Hehe!

I have worked extensively with Smalltalk, I know it quite well and it's my favorite language. I made SqueakMap and several other packages for Squeak. Still, it's not as simple as it can/could be, especially not the meta model. Alan Kay himself has the same feelings AFAIK.

They = me. I suppose you did it when Spry was still called Ni?

The general idea was to leverage Nim's capabilities, either as implementing core parts of standard libraries in Nim (which is very easy to do) or possibly by partial compilation using the Nim meta programming mechanisms.

A lot of things including very good development speed, very good debugging capabilities, very good meta programming (making your own tools) etc. Try out Pharo.org for example.

Looking at my inspirations I would (take it with a grain of salt) say that Lisp and Forth are too simple, javascript is a mess (but with nice literal syntax for maps etc), Smalltalk is too complicated and Rebol is basically also a bit complicated and IMHO a bit of an oddball with some neat ideas. And Nim is a totally different beast.

The multiuser stuff etc, I am temporarily too focused on other things so Spry is at "a hold" right now. I would also like to fix more things in the language before proceeding.

The Smalltalk keyword syntax is a simple preprocessing in the parser so that `a at: 3 put: 5` turns into the AST of `a at:put: 3 5`. And yes, it's homoiconic.

I have been wanting to play with wrapping the ESP-IDF for Nim (using the excellent c2nim tool), but ... it appears to be a fairly hefty job. Although I am sure Araq could do it in no time :)