How to Design a Smalltalk UI Framework
It’s common for Smalltalk implementations to run on multiple platforms, and that leads to the problem of designing a framework to allow an application UI to display on all those platforms. The existing...
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Brazil Example: a Classic Smalltalk Browser
Here is an example of a classic Smalltalk browser implemented in Brazil. While the main point here is to illustrate Brazil API, an important related point I want to make first is that in our system...
View ArticleHow to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Implicit Receivers
I remember a thread on squeak-dev sometime in summer 2007 discussing implicit self as a hypothetical feature for Smalltalk. Back then we were not yet talking about Newspeak, and so I held my peace. But...
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A Taste of Nested Classes, part 1
In the recent posts I mentioned that because of class nesting the receiver of an implicit-receiver message send is not necessarily “self”. The full story with a comparison to other approaches is told...
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A Taste of Nested Classes, part 2
(Continues from part 1) Let’s now look at some message sends. Suppose we design the application so that the message respondToHit is sent to an asteroid when it’s hit by a missile. In Smalltalk, a...
View ArticleA Taste of Nested Classes, part 3
(Continues from part 2). After an unplanned hiatus caused by various real life issues including the irritating surprise of becoming unemployed in these interesting times, here is the long-promised...
View ArticleA Taste of Nested Classes, intermission
(Continues from part 3). This post is an intermission because it’s not specifically about nested classes. In fact, it’s not about anything that really exists in Newspeak. Instead, it reviews a few...
View ArticleReferrer watching
I’ve just discovered that Jörg Mittag was kind enough to mention Newspeak, Brazil and Hopscotch as the biggest thing so far in developer tools in 2009. That’s nice to hear, even if only in an answer to...
View ArticleA Taste of Nested Classes, part 4
(Continues from the intermission). In the previous examples I sometimes referred to the familiar Smalltalk library classes such as OrderedCollection as if it were the most natural thing to do. But what...
View ArticleElements of Goodthink: Setter Sends
Smalltalkers are in a pretty good position to understand Newspeak code out of the box. Unfamiliar constructs such as nested classes and the related message lookup semantics need some experience to...
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