budd@mist.cs.orst.edu (Tim Budd) (02/28/91)
Archive-name: languages/smalltalk/little-smalltalk/1991-02-27 Archive-directory: cs.orst.edu:/pub/budd/smv3/ [128.193.32.1] Original-posting-by: budd@mist.cs.orst.edu (Tim Budd) Original-subject: Little Smalltalk Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) Here are the facts on Little Smalltalk. You can obtain the source from cs.orst.edu, (anonymous ftp) in one of two forms: * directory /pub/budd/smv1 has version 1, the ``book'' version * directory /pub/budd/smv3 has version 3, a slightly better version. (you may be able to get it from elsewhere as well. It's PD, so anybody is free to redistribute it). Neither has been touched for over a year. When digitalk announced Smalltalk/V for the mac I thought the days of Little Smalltalk were numbered, and when GNU Smalltalk was announced I thought it was dead. Who would want a Smalltalk that was text-oriented (not graphics), relatively slow, and unsupported? Little Smalltalk was created by myself alone, in my spare time when I'm not teaching, or writing books or other things. I would get it working on my machine (usually a Unix system), and leave it to students or others to port it to various other systems (PC's, macs, various other flavors of unixies, etc.) The result was always somewhat slipshod even in the best of times. I never felt too bad about this - after all public domain software is usually worth about what you pay for it. Well, judging from the requests I continue to receive, I may have been premature in thinking that Little Smalltalk was dead. There still seems to be a need for a Smalltalk that is really small enough to be understood easily. I view Little Smalltalk more as a pedagogical tool - a learning experience, and certainly not for any serious development. Anyway, this is a long answer to a short question that wasn't even asked. What is the future of Little Smalltalk? After having done nothing for over a year, I recently purchased a Mac LC for my home use. In those few spare moments when I can get it away from my kids (playing Carmin SanDiego) or my wife (playing tetris), I've been experimenting with improving the mac interface to Little Smalltalk. Please don't send me disks or start asking for the system - at the rate I'm going this may not see the light of day for another six months or so. Nevertheless, eventually there will be a new release that will run both under X and under the Mac which will have a better user interface, will have more support software written in Smalltalk (currently much of the system is in C and not in Smalltalk), and so on. Who knows, if I think there is still a demand for Little Smalltalk I may consider even revising the book! --tim budd, oregon state university, budd@cs.orst.edu