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The Early History Of Smalltalk
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Alan Kay recounts how Smalltalk grew from ARPA and Xerox PARC personal-computing ambitions into a crystallization language where every object is a recursion of the whole computer, communicating only by messages. Hosted by Bret Victor, the essay maps sixties ancestors (Sketchpad, JOSS, LISP, Simula) and argues the shift was not a better mainframe but nearly a new thing: Dynabook-scale interaction, learning-oriented interfaces, and a biological scheme of protected cells that made modern OOP and windowing imaginable.
ideas
- Almost a new thing, not a better old thing. Sixties time-sharing and graphics were not just improved mainframes; exponential compute/$ demanded handheld Dynabooks, Montessori-like learning UIs, and end-user literacy.
- Objects as universal behavioral cells. Everything describable is recursive composition of one building block that hides state and process and interacts only through messages—closer to biology and Leibnizian monads than to data-plus-procedures.
- Each object is a whole computer. Instead of weaker parts (structures, procedures, functions), Smalltalk recurses the full machine so representation can be postponed while behavior stays primary.
- Crystallization of style beats feature agglutination. LISP, APL, and Smalltalk concentrate a single person's style; committee languages accumulate features.
- Priority is less important than attitude. Kay credits a community of pioneers who treated wonderful relative advances as still far from absolute thresholds worth climbing.
quotes
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer.”
“Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the mountain.”
“hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages”