In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand created PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) in 1968— two years before Xerox had in his Life 1—and hired the same computer scientists (Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, and Dan Ingalls) to create the Smalltalk programming language. This advanced its development by several years. He provided them with...
I recently watched a YouTube video by “Uncle Bob” entitled “The Last Programming Language,” in which the speaker predicts what he believes will be the features of the last, best programming language. After discussing several currently popular languages (C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, etc.), he admits that all these languages are essentially rehashings of the control and...
Smalltalk is a general-purpose, object-oriented, programming language. Objects are entities consisting of data (numbers, strings, collections, and programmer-defined classes of objects) that are encapsulated by the methods (i.e., functions) defined by the class of the object. No other objects can affect its encapsulated data unless the class provides accessor methods for that data. This description...
