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."