Images Images are basically memory dumps. Typically a Lisp development system starts a runtime plus an image. The user then makes changes and later can write a new image. Sometimes this is a feature used by the developer, sometimes it’s also used during the development of the Lisp system itself. Many Lisp systems are using … Read more
I have answers to question one and two: This is true. However since version 2.8 Seaside is not a strictly “continuation-based” framework anymore. Seaside uses continuations in the flow module only. Since Seaside 3.0 the flow module is even optional. Also note that Seaside has strong Javascript support since 2005, this is long before mainstream … Read more
Setup for Pharo (and Gemstone) Each developer works in his own image. Every change to a method he makes is saved locally in the changes file. This allows recovering when crashing the image. Commits are made by creating a monticello file, having a package name, sequence number and the name of the developer. It knows … Read more
To certain extent, it is a matter of personal taste. Pharo is fork of Squeak intended make it more modern version of Smalltalk, sometimes at expense of not sticking to backward compatibility to Squeak. Pharo being a fork, also means that they share much in common, from VM to huge parts of class library. Many … Read more
Message passing Smalltalk uses message passing, not method invocation. The distinction is subtle, but enormously powerful. Some terminology: Given foo bar: baz, #bar: is a selector, foo is the receiver of a message called #bar: (the # indicates a symbol, much like Common Lisp would say ‘bar (or even more appropriately, :bar)), and baz is … Read more
Smalltalk was one of the earliest object-oriented (OO) languages (with others like Simula and Eiffel) and can be said to be extremely “pure” in an OO sense: Everything is an object and objects are only communicated with via the sending of messages No primitives (no ints, booleans etc) No control structures (no for, while, if … Read more
If you like Ruby you’ll probably like Smalltalk. IIRC Seaside has been ported to the Gemstone VM, which is part of their Gemstone/S OODBMS. This has much better thread support than Ruby, so it is a better back-end for a high-volume system. This might be a good reason to take a close look at it. … Read more
I’m more of a Pythonista than a Ruby user, however the same things hold for Ruby for much the same reasons. The architecture of Smalltalk is somewhat insular whereas Python and Ruby were built from the ground up to facilitate integration. Smalltalk never really gained a body of hybrid application support in the way that … Read more