November 5, 2025
Smalltalk, big feelings
Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
Old-school Smalltalk gets love, a grilling, and a ‘show the code’ showdown
TLDR: A Ruby blog revisits Smalltalk’s influence on Ruby and its quirky ‘image’ idea of freezing app state. Comments explode with nostalgia, deployment puzzles, a browser-based comeback link, and one loud refrain—show the code—proving decades-old tech still stirs real fights about how software should be built.
Ruby’s neighbor Smalltalk just got a nostalgic shoutout from Noel Rappin, and the comments lit up like it’s 1997. The crowd’s split: one camp swoons over Smalltalk’s wild party trick—the “image,” a freeze-and-move snapshot of your whole app. As one fan put it, that’s basically software immortality, with shoutouts to Pharo and Squeak keeping the flame alive. Another wave rolls in with a fresh angle: if you crave that Smalltalk vibe today, try Newspeak, a browser-based reboot pitched with live debugging and old-school charm.
But not everyone’s here for the vibes. A blunt skeptic storms in with the energy of a code review at 2 a.m.: talk is cheap—show the code. That jab turned the thread into a mini culture war: storytime historians vs. “prove it with snippets” hardliners. Meanwhile, a curious commenter asks the practical question everyone else glossed over: if Smalltalk was “basically its own mini operating system,” how did people actually ship apps to normal users? Kiosk mode? Secret sauce? The mystery adds fuel.
Between the immortal app hype, the Newspeak revival tour, and the code-or-gtfo crowd, this Smalltalk nostalgia trip became a full-on community cage match—with just enough Disney/Squeak lore to keep the nerds smiling.
Key Points
- •Smalltalk strongly influenced Ruby’s object model, particularly the principle that all data is part of the object system, though Ruby did not adopt Smalltalk’s syntax.
- •Smalltalk originated at Xerox PARC, evolved through the 1970s, and Smalltalk-80 became the widely known version released beyond PARC.
- •In the 1980s–1990s, Smalltalk was a commercial language with vendors like ParcPlace (ObjectWorks/VisualWorks) and Digitalk, and saw significant industry use, including aviation.
- •In 1995, members of the original Smalltalk team at Apple released Squeak, an open-source Smalltalk VM with a small C kernel and most of the system written in Smalltalk, using a Smalltalk-to-C compiler.
- •Squeak’s design enabled easy portability, and the author recalls encountering it at OOPSLA 1997 and meeting Adele Goldberg from the original PARC team.