Celebrating 50 Years of Smalltalk

In 1972, Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and Adele Goldberg at Xerox PARC created a revolutionary new programming language called Smalltalk. It was designed as a very simple, instructional language for teaching programming to young people. It was designed as a purely Object-Oriented language based on the message passing paradigm.

How simple is Smalltalk? You can learn its complete syntax, which fits on a post card, in less than 15 minutes! Try that with Python.

Since then, Smalltalk has become an important industrial language used by enterprises all around the globe. There are three major Smalltalk vendors with thousands of enterprise customers between them (Cincom, Instantiations, GemTalk Systems). Smalltalk is used for writing massive applications like ERP and industrial control systems like silicon wafer fabrication at Lam Research and tiny IoT systems like for Raspberry Pi. Smalltalk is used for web applications and data science and machine learning. Smalltalk is used practically everywhere!

The huge draw of Smalltalk lies in two areas: 1) low cognitive load on the developer; and 2) high programming productivity. It is not uncommon to write a Smalltalk application in a fraction of the time it would take in Python or JavaScript or Java. The key is Smalltalk’s live programming capability.

Smalltalk came to prominence in the 1980s when it was featured in the August 1981 edition of BYTE magazine.

Smalltalk achieved its zenith of popularity in the 1990s as Smalltalk went head to head with C++ and was chosen as the centre piece of IBM’s VisualAge enterprise initiative.

In fact, according to a 1995 IDC report, Object-Oriented language market shares were:

The rise of Java from Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s eclipsed Smalltalk, which then fell out of favour. But Smalltalk remains recognized as the finest Object-Oriented programming language to this day.

Smalltalk was extremely influential in the design of other Object-Oriented languages, most notably Objective-C, Ruby, Python, and CLOS (Common Lisp Object System).

JWARS is a simulation of theatre level warfare that was developed at the US Department of Defense. Development started in 1995 and it consisted of over 1.1 million lines of Smalltalk before the program was canceled in October 2010 for ‘budgetary’ reasons. Nevertheless, this was one of the greatest demonstrations of Smalltalk’s technological power.

Camp Smalltalk is a regularly held conference for people from all around the world to come together to talk about Smalltalk. This year, 2022, a “supreme” edition of Camp Smalltalk was held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the programming language.

Camp Smalltalk Supreme featured illustrious keynote speakers like Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, and Kent Beck. Free T-shirts and flashlight keychains were given away. There were birthday cake and refreshments, and even a celebration banquet for attendees! It was quite the birthday party.

To watch the video recordings of all the presentations, visit Smalltalk Renaissance — 50 Years of Smalltalk – YouTube.

Ana DuCristea, winner of the James Robertson Memorial Programming Competition for 2022, was supposed to attend Camp Smalltalk to receive her award. JRMPC 2022 also celebrated the 50th anniversary of Smalltalk. Unfortunately, she had to cancel at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. Nevertheless, here is Ana with her award...

Let’s close with some memorable pictures from the event…

Keynote speakers and organizers photo:

Sponsors and organizers photo:

Group photo (full resolution image here):

All photos from Camp Smalltalk were taken by Adriaan van Os, who has generously shared them with us. Visit his website at https://a3aan.st/.