The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

Travels With Smalltalk

Reprinted from Celebrating 25 Years of Smalltalk, SIGS Publications.

Smalltalk

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.

Cuis Smalltalk

The modern Smalltalk-80

Small talk acts like social glue – here’s how to get better at it

Maybe think of small talk as a technology: a human invention for accomplishing social goals.

Unorthodocs: Abandon your DVCS and Return to Sanity - bitquabit

I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper, but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone. I actually remember struggling to grok tla, and being happy that someone took the time to write baz. I remember the promise and the failure that was Darcs. I remember thinking that even Darcs was comically primitive, because it was nothing but a poor imitation of Smalltalk DVCSes like Monticello, themselves mere iterative improvements on classic Smalltalk changesets.[1]

The Early History Of Smalltalk

Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. HOPL-II/4/93/MA, USA © 1993 ACM 0-89791-571-2/93/0004/0069...$1.50

Researchers say we’re talking less than ever

It’s not just small talk, it’s all talk that’s dying.

The AT Protocol's interesting design - LittleBit

Bluesky's backend was made to be more than a social network

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This piece was initially published on Medium. I’m resharing here, for when Medium will go away… We all know that RSS and openness are key to the web’s resilience and independence, yet the RSS ecosystem is still shrinking. It’s because of us…

The rise (and future fall) of Discord

I want to talk about Discord. Not about all the issues like privacy, accessibility, performance. No, the good things. The part where it completely revolutionized the internet. And how it will destroy it all.

Building Communities That Think

Social media and instant messaging fundamentally changed how we talk to each other. The paragraph has ceded power to fast moving and ephemeral chat that inevitably leans toward the shallow and reactive.

The Melancholy of Subculture Society

Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.