What is Squeak?
Squeak is a free Smalltalk system originally released by a team including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney and Scott Wallace in 1996 when they were working at Apple. You might recognise the first three names from early Smalltalk papers from Xerox PARC. They produced a rather nice Smalltalk system with the unusual virtue that both the image and the Virtual Machine are open source - i.e. free, gratis and "no charge to you sir".
Finding Out More About Squeak
To find most of the web resources for Squeak, look at the Squeak.Org site. There are lots of pointers to information about Smalltalk, instructions for downloading Squeak, tutorials, FAQs etc. I won't waste space by duplicating any of it here. I do most strongly recommend that you read many of them.
Squeak runs on...
Macs, iPhones, most UNIX & Linux systems, Windows of various versions and some obscure specialised systems. See the above mentioned master page for details on how to get the files.
I spent many years making Smalltalk available for RISC OS and other ARM based systems but since the effective demise of RISC OS a couple of years ago there hasn’t really been much point carrying on. There is some faint activity around RISC OS and the rather nice BeagleBoard hardware so perhaps it will eventually be worth building a VM for that.
Building the VM with VMMaker
I also developed and for many years maintained the VMMaker package, the lump of Squeak code that defines and generates the bulk of the VM. See the VMMaker page on the Squeak Swiki for more info. You can fetch the VMMaker package from SqueakMap or use the SqueakMap tool in the image and look for (guess what) VMMaker. You will also need a SubVersion client so that you can fetch the handwritten parts of the VM source code from the repository.
Once you have mastered the complexities of the VMMaker and successfully built yourself a custom VM you should download this certificate to attest to your mighty geekiness.
Stuff wot I wrot
• I contributed a chapter describing the structure, function, design and implementation of virtual machines and the lowest level of Smalltalk code to "Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia" edited by Mark Guzdial and Kim Rose, published by Prentiss-Hall. An online version of that chapter is here.
• I worked on a realtime OS in Squeak whilst employed at Interval Research Corp
• A short paper on making BitBlt work for little-endian machines without having an intermediate display-on-screen conversion
Squeak logo artwork
At the dawn of Squeak-time we needed a logo. Every project needs a logo. I designed one, it caught on and can be found all over the web, on T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, badges, underwear, hats and probably secret spy satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
Here are some files of the Squeak logo that you may like to use:-
-
32x32 - 48x48
- 64x64
- as a pdf and therefore scalable
Comments on java programming
"Java programming is like teenage sex ....
- Everyone talks about it all of the time (but they don't really know what they're talking about);
- Everyone claims to be doing it;
- Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it;
- Those few who are actually doing it:
- Are not practicing it safely;
- Are doing it poorly, and
- Are sure it will be better next time."