Re: T-Shirts, Neil Young, Asilomar, and Smalltalk

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Phil Fraering writes:

> Aren't there freely available versions of Smalltalk for Unix?
> GNU Smalltalk apparently lacks the classical graphic interface,
> but from what I've seen, so does Perl ;-)
> 
> pgf

Yes, and you mostly get what you pay for: a "toy" environment that
nobody I know uses for anything. (The Gnu Smalltalk is analogous to
the toy implementations of Lisp and Scheme in C....a useful pegagogic
tool, but lacking the richness that the full "environments" are so
well-known for.)

The serious work is done in ParcPlace's VisualWorks, DigiTalk's
Smalltalk/V, or the new SmalltalkAgents from QKS.

Besides, I don't _have_ a Unix machine and I have no interest in
getting one (nor in trying to install a Unix on my Macs).  The above
programs are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix, in varying
degrees and combinations. (VisualWorks is mostly targetting Windows,
Smalltalk/V is a cheaper alternative, for both Windows and Macs, and
SmalltalkAgents has been released for the Mac, with versions for the
PowerPC (Q2 94), and Windows32/NT and SPARCstations to follow.

I'm not grinding an axe for Smalltalk, understand. Just commenting on
some directions. Maybe TCL is the way to go, maybe mixtures of Perl
scripts and short C programs are The One True Way (the remailers work
this way, and they are our major public success to date, with new
things like MagicMoney following the same path, so....).

The proposed language "Joule" (which some of our list members are
doing) may or may not be ideal, but in any case it is probably at
least a few years off.

--Tim May


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