LOL
Optimized, like #ifTrue:ifFalse:
And there was a fellow there with a Mac Plus, and he had the Apple ST image running on it.
The Apple ST image was a descendant of the original Xerox image. This is the same image that became Squeak. Quite the heritage.
The first the the guy showed me was how easy it was to change the width of the scroll bar. A simple tweak and, voila, the scroll bar changed. This worked particularly well because in the original UI, the scroll bar was a popup (unlike most are today).
It was a dynamic demo to be sure to get that kind of reactivity to development. Made an impression to be sure.
A broader definition of content would include things you read, listen to, or watch and lots of writers, musicians, and film makers do a lot of their work on Apple hardware.
The suitable only for content consumption claim just doesn’t hold up.
All the IBM's Visual Age line of IDEs were written in Smalltalk, and in a way it was the ".NET" of OS/2.
SOM (OS/2 COM) supported it natively, and one biggest difference to COM is that it supports meta-classes and proper inheritance, language agnostic.
What made Smalltalk lose industry mindshare was exactly Java.
When it came out, some major vendors, like IBM, pivoted all the way into Java, leaving Smalltalk behind.
It is no accident that Eclipse was designed by some of the GoF authors, and it is initially a rewrite of Visual Age underlying platform from Smalltalk to Java.
Eclipse even to this day has a Smalltalk like code browser.
It wasn't only the IDEs, some famous Java libraries, like JUnit, started their life as Smalltalk libraries.
Now as full OS, yes that never really took off.
Note not all Smalltalk vendors switched to Java, that is why Dolphin and Cincom Smalltalk are still around.
Cincom only acquired the VisualWorks Smalltalk software after ParcPlace had unsuccessfully rebranded as ObjectShare in response to the emergence of free as in beer Java.
[1] https://cuis.st/
Cuis Smalltalk and related implementations are rather self-contained systems to the point they seemed walled off from the rest of the system, making it difficult to develop Smalltalk programs using external tools.
However, there's something compelling about the idea of a Smalltalk (or Lisp) OS running on bare hardware, where everything runs in a single address space. I've been thinking about this for a few years, but I haven't had time to pursue these ideas. Some ideas from the 1994 paper "Sharing and Protection in a Single-Address-Space Operating System" (https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/opal.pdf) could be applicable to add some security to a Smalltalk OS.
It isn't the full thing, but apparently it is very hard to get mainstream interest in such approaches.
Naturally this is not the same as using Smalltalk, or the other three Xerox PARC siblings, only partially.
There were some efforts to run Squeak on the Raspberry PI I think, but eventually they runned out of steam.
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/making-smalltalk-on-a-raspbe...
The project you linked to recreated the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 on the Pi. It has a rather limited scope so I don't know if they ran out of steam or simply reached the end.
I guess that by "ordinary programs" you mean command-line TUI programs.
Being able to explore and inspect helps whether you are writing GUI or TUI.
When you write Smalltalk code with a Smalltalk IDE, your actions have an implicit context. If you write Smalltalk code with a plain text editor, you must provide that missing context. Something like the fileOut format —
!BenchmarksGame class methodsFor: 'initialize-release'!
I played with (Pharo) Smalltalk a bit in the past, it'd be nice to try it again in the browser.
jll29•5h ago
Goldberg & Robson (1983) Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementataion http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....