Smalltalk’s Third Wave

The Smalltalk language, graphical user interface and programming environment were developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970’s.  Over the past three decades, these innovations have slowly been incorporated into the mainstream programming environment.

The First Wave 1984-1995

The widespread adoption of the Smalltalk GUI can probably be traced to Apple’s Lisa project. According to Alan Kay’s “The Early History of Smalltalk“, Steve Jobs and other members of Apple were given a demo of the Smalltalk environment which impressed them sufficiently that Apple tried (unsuccessfully) to purchase the technology from Xerox. Of course, Apple then went on to develop a similar GUI themselves for their Lisa computer.

The Lisa was not a commercial success, but its successor, the Macintosh (1984) was, and still is, one of the most successful personal computer systems ever introduced. In turn, the introduction of the Macintosh prodded Microsoft to begin the Windows project (starting about 1985), and by the introduction of Windows 3.1 (1992), more PC users were using Windows than DOS. With the arrival of the 32-bit Windows 95 (1995) and Windows NT, the triumph of the Smalltalk style GUI was essentially complete.

The Second Wave 1992-Present

The adoption of the Smalltalk programming environment has taken somewhat longer than that of the GUI. Client-centered programming languages today are likely to be object-oriented, capable of reflection, use virtual machine technology, and have a rich Integrated Programming Environment (IDE) with refactoring tools, stepping debuggers, and object inspectors – all of which have been part of the Smalltalk environment for almost thirty years.

The Third Wave – Just Starting

Many of Smalltalk’s innovations have now become part of the mainstream programming environment. What role then, remains for Smalltalk in the age of the Internet?

As internet connectivity improves, we will increasingly be building ad-hoc, highly connected applications. Think of how online games or workgroups might evolve as Peer-to-Peer networking becomes commonplace, or think of how applications aggregating data simultaneously from dozens of webservices might evolve.

We will need a more powerful way of doing programming to build ”instant” applications robustly and quickly.

Smalltalk originated in the powerful biological concept of “protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior (Alan Kay)”.

With its simple messaging paradigm and minimal syntax, Smalltalk is probably the best language yet invented for harnessing the increasing potential of the Internet.