Why “Smalltalk” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Rochus and I were arguing about this a couple of weeks ago, and I read through a bunch of historical papers, including Teitelbaum talking about how Smalltalk influenced Interlis…
by kragen · Oct 6, 2026
When I was in college, Brad Cox came and gave a talk about Objective-C (and more generally his 'software IC' ideas). He was pretty clear how Smalltalk was a key influence. His b…
by kjs3 · Oct 6, 2026
Tektronix sold Smalltalk workstations [1], you could run Lisp on them as well. You may have been able to run Smalltalk-80 on a Xerox Daybreak which was a fair bit faster than an…
by rjsw · Oct 6, 2026
In many ways NeXTSTEP can be thought of as a “pragmatic Smalltalk environment” that traded some of Smalltalk’s dynamism for improved compatibility with the Unix ecosystem. Recal…
by linguae · Oct 6, 2026
I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementati…
by gumby · Oct 6, 2026
For me, it was Hamburg, Germany. They later replaced Smalltalk with Java and BlueJ, IIRC. It had a similar visual feel (you could click on a class and create an instance of it t…
by jttnr · Oct 6, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "smalltalk" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "smalltalk" over time.
Smalltalk is a purely object-oriented programming language that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Scott Wallace. Read more on Wikipedia