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Smalltalk is used by many commercial endeavors, and often especially for applications which much change very nimbly. Modern Smalltalks are fast, compact and have all the tools you need including refactoring, unit testing, source code management, etc.

Cincom, the largest vendor of Smalltalk products recently announced 88% growth in their Smalltalk business over the last year. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/

Croquet, an open source initiative created in Smalltalk by some seriously famous computer scientists including Alan Kay, David A. Smith, David P. Reed is taking aim at creating the future of distributed computing. http://opencroquet.org/

Smalltalk is alive and well. :-)

Not very circumspect, I see.

About Croquet
Screenshots

Not very circumspect, I see.

About Croquet
Screenshots

This looks cool.

I know about XMLRPC, I have used it a lot and it can be great sometimes for creating functions that have simple input and ouput values but require heavy calculations or functions that aren't easily implemented in LSL because of the lack of arrays etc. The embedded firefox browser will be an improvement, especially combined with mono. Still a lot of things are not possible, some of the reason being that everything runs server side and trying to run a complex application in addition to the server software just brings the server to a grinding halt. What is really needed is the ability to run client side scripts. Even relatively simple stuff tend to bog down the servers because all scripts run server side and a lot of people run scripts. Another big limitation is that there aren't any graphics function, you can't draw on the sides of objects, no functions like llPutPixel(int x,int y), while the embedded browser will broaden the possibilities for in-world UI design widely there are many cases where you want functions like PutPixel, drawLine, drawRect etc. Croquet is a 3d collaborative online world that allows a lot of this. You can make GUI applications on 3d windows in a really cool way but it too has a lot of issues.

"Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that just works. Sure its a real steal at no cost. But for kids, the cost of the OS doesnt matter. The fact that it just works is good. But what they really want to do is get into the internals and rip it apart to see what makes it tick. What better candidate than something that's open source?"

It depends on what the goal of providing kids with cheap computers is.

If the goal is for the kids to use the computers as tools to use in school to learn non-computer subjects, MacOS X with the bundled applications (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, graphing calculator, etc.) provides fantastic learning tools. Though I'm far from sure that $100 computers could be used for photo and video editing. Of course, the availability of thousands of educational programs for the Mac would certainly make the computers more useful for general education than a Linux computer (which has relatively little educational software available).

If the goal is for the kids to learn about computers, Linux is an OK answer. Since all of the source is available (though you won't be recompiling the entire OS and application stack on an $100 computer, so this is somewhat academic), it's a bit better than MacOS X on this score, where most of the environment is OSS, but with a proprietary framework and many applications). But from the perspective of being a software environment that's open for exploration, Linux or Mac OS X can't hold a candle to Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org/).

I suspect that the reason that they turned down Apple wasn't because of what teachers or students want or need, but the goals of the people running the project. They (I am guessing) really want to create an open source consumer platform, and this "education" strategy is a way that they've picked to bypass Microsoft's dominance of the desktop OS market. I suspect that they picked the goal of $100 total cost including the OS, storage, etc., because it precludes x86 CPU's and Windows licensing costs and resources, so MS is excluded by definition. So if your goal is to jump-start OSS as a consumer platform, you won't want to use Apple's proprietary OS even if that would be better for the teachers and students, because it doesn't achieve your real goal. That's not to say that this goal isn't legitimate (in the long run, you could argue that jump-starting OSS on the desktop is good for everyone), but it's a long-term strategic goal that is more important to Red Hat, for example, and makes the computer much less useful for students and teachers for the next few years. I suspect that Apple knew that their offer couldn't be accepted by Red Hat (who wants Linux) or MIT (who wants a "clean slate" for research), but felt that it was better to make the offer than not.

Whatever the reasons, if they don't want to use the best OS for religious/strategic reasons, they really should consider Squeak Smalltalk as a platform. It has some advantages over the traditional Linux application stack:
- Smalltalk was designed and has been used for educational purposes for three decades. Squeak Smalltalk in particular is a fantastic teaching environment. There are all sorts of powerful components available (e.g. http://www.opencroquet.org/, a distributed 3D environment, http://www.squeakland.org/ which has tons of great code generated by students and teachers, http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html, which documents a huge number of educational projects based on Squeak Smalltalk, etc.).
- Squeak is completely open source, written in itself. This makes it much easier to understand than all of the layered technologies that are "Linux", which makes it more useful for students.
- Squeak is far more resource efficient than the full Linux application stack. It can run over Linux, or Windows, or MacOS X, or WinCE, or even without

if you look around you'll find some links to croquet, which is exactly what you're describing here. ~Anders

You think that looks silly you should see this.

Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/

Basicly you get 3D desktop and web environments, and you exist inside of them (imagine being in a first person shooter.. and instead of shooting, looking at your computer. Now imagine this being a MMOG and instead of the person sneaking up behind you and shooting you in the head online; he is able to see what your doing and interact with you and your screen.

You have to hand it to him though - he has the Slashdot userid 200000 and he always manages to get posts ending in 2 and a number of zeros...! AMAZING!

Almost as amazing as his new world. Speaking of which, what's going on with Open Croquet? There's your new world mr 200000!

Human Computer Interaction, for many, seems to have been pegged down to the windows 95 explorer.exe interface. The best project(s) that I've seen to demonstate possible Ideas is the OpenCroquet project:

[definition]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
[project]
http://www.opencroquet.org/
It's only a dev release, but very promising. PhD. Alan Kay, the head of the project, has some 40 years experience and has been in the lead of many tech projects, such as the Xerox Parc team that made smalltalk and a lot of other great stuff. To be amazed, check out this site for Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation: http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html

Further, the web-monkey's user experience would probably be completely ruined by latency once the school's web site got /. 'ed.

Further it would totally ruin the slash-dotters experience once mr. user decided to go off and try using something like croquet ( well it slowed my mac down when I tried it; )

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

Proably wont win any karma for saying this but what exactly has Alan Kay done in like the last 20 years.

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.

Educators, generals, dieticians, psychologists, and parents program. Armies, students, and some societies are programmed. (...)
Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process.

There probably WILL be an open source system such as Second Life at some point. But that point might be ten years in the future for all we know.

My favorite candidate on the Open Source camp is Croquet. It is designed by some of the early pioneers of the user interface such as Alan Key. It's goals are broader than Second Life, I hope it succeeds!

On the other hand, I think that eventually Linden Labs will open source it's own system, and simply keep control of the economy like they do right now.

http://www.accessgrid.org/

It's a teleconferencing on caffeine solution from NCSA. It's used for large, distributed, meetings, and interactive collaboration. We had an access point at my last job, and it works, if you've got the hardware/bandwidth to throw at it. Nice for distributed learning and lectures, plus can be extended.

On a more personal level, i.e. if you can run a skunkworks for a while while you build the environment, would be for you and a couple of like-minded developers to start playing with OpenCroquet. This gives you a persistent virtual environment, with the ability to run programs from the remote participants as screens within the CroquetSpace. http://www.opencroquet.org/

Of course, these are academic solutions, for people with user communities used to space-cadet solutions. However, a Croquetspace with your architects/engineers meeting in a Cave, with people displaying and interactively working on everything from blueprints through solid-models would be majorly cool.

I had a look at this a week or so back, since there was a link to it on Terra Nova.
I really wasn't particularly impressed, to be honest, although I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it is still very much early days as far as the project is concerned.

There would also be a couple of major obstacles to this in the real world, sadly.

a) With regards to content in particular, Sturgeon's Law would probably apply with a brutal vengeance.

b) With client-side character files and (worse yet) individual control of bandwidth from peers, you'd see 14 year old Neo wannabes swarming out of the woodwork everywhere, with things like the recent Blizzard speed hack, item duping, and so forth.

c) Although most people might, not everybody has broadband yet, sadly...and for this, everyone would need to. (I'm still on a 56k modem myself)

At least in terms of its level of progress, Croquet is far more interesting. I downloaded it and had a mess around with it...and although there are some issues which could be majorly improved, (texture size needs to be made uniform, for one thing) it's coming along well. It will be a while I think before a sufficient portion of the online population will have the processing capacity or bandwidth for a networked version of Croquet to be large-scale viable...but when we get to that point it could be very interesting. It essentially looks like an ancestor of the sort of completely 3D, networked virtual environment that Gibson and others wrote about.

Also vaguely interesting and along similar lines is Alan Kay's Croquet project.

It's not particularly mind blowing, but it has potential.

Croquet. There's nothing else like it.

This would appear to mesh exactly with your aims :-

http://www.opencroquet.org/

Two psossible downsides SmallTalk and Alan Kay. Both are positives for me but I understand some peoples aversion.

21. Sun's Looking Glass Project."

Take a look at the Croquet Project. It's trying to do the same sort of thing but without the Sun/Java headache.

I think that Croquet will be a huge shot in the arm for Squeak. I have played with it about 6 months ago, but Croquet has inspired me to order The White Book and the OpenGL programming guide, to really dig into Squeak in April. Can't wait.

Sometime I'll take another look at Squeak, which seems to be the anointed successor to Smalltalk. I have a friend who's been a total fanatic about Smalltalk for many years - it has affected his career in interesting ways. A few months ago he got me interested in its descendant Squeak, because of Alan Croquet 3D system written in Squeak. So far, I've just bounced off when I've tried to do anything with it. I've been doing procedural programming for a long time. I think it was Dykstra who said (approximately), "Anyone who is proficient in FORTRAN can quickly learn to write FORTRAN in any language." I may try again soonish, although it's not

This note speaks to my interest - IMHO the next, and most interesting, phase of UI design will be in the use of 3D to create not just usable but "amenable" user interfaces.

For me, that will have to wait until I can get a better machine, preferably one I can use with polarized 3D glasses!! :O) I managed to get Croquet running on my system, but it was so slow (I'm running at 650 MHz) that it was unusable, and I diskliked the little buttons around the edge. Tthey seemed counterintuitive to me, but of course I grew up in a different UI paradign so who am I to say.

One problem I didn't have time to figure out at the time was that Croquet's OpenGL driver setup was hardwired into the code, and didn't accept my OpenGL setup (I'm running DRI). But that's another story.

Kay works a lot on new ideas, many of them being incorporated into Squeak and Croquet. The ideas are still rough, though, so in some cases I don't know if I'd say they were accessible yet. Such is the nature of research. (But even kids are using Squeak.)

That's the goal of the OpenCroquet project. As usual Alan Kay is ahead of the game.

Check out OpenCroquet "Users and groups of users can author and publish their individual resources within a persistent 3D knowledge architecture. They may build any number of private or shared "worlds" instantaneously, making them immediately accessible for others to explore by providing spatial portals. These portals function much like hyperlinks do within the World Wide Web. But unlike the Web, Croquet enables the user to find and get to other individual worlds through the larger context of Croquet's persistent common spaces"

And I'll say the same thing here. that I said there.

They need two things, panning, and windows (ZUI can apply to windows as it can the entire field).

You also forgot Croquet (http://www.opencroquet.org/).

And last, your example shows that there's more to flash, than what the haters say (prototyping experimental interfaces)

Maybe it's time for Jobs to make second visit to Alan Kay to see his recent musing ;-) The first one gave enough ideas for Macintosh and NeXT...

He did great stuff in the 1970s inventing SmallTalk, developing graphics GUIs, a formulating the "Dynabook", the early PDA.

This stimulated Jobs and Gates to commercialize graphical computing and OOP-based OS's.

Kay... missed "industrial-strength" OOP

Here's what Alan says about C++: "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

Here's what Alan says about Java (he really has a lot to say about Java).

It seems to me that "industrial-strength" OOP missed the whole point of the OO.

Kay... missed the significance of the Web

Kay... missed the significance of ... PDAs

Kay... missed... cellphones

The Gore-Gates initative to make the Web available in every school and library by year 2000 did far more for children computing access than SmallTalk and eQuariums.

Lets see if the moderators can distinguish a contrarian opinion from troll-bait.

Oh, and if you're actually interested in what Kay has been up to, watch the video linked as Kay's Java comments. The man's been damn busy, and I hear that later this year there will be a public release of his current project, Croquet.

If you're interested in more about what Alan's been working on recently, check out Alan Kay and David Smith's Keynote at ETECH 2003.

I've seen it firsthand (some alpha builds sitting right here) and have to say it's damn impressive. He's recruited some really smart people, and I'm quite excited about what they're working on (self-modifying code, smart objects (object veiling/advanced capability models), P2P sync/mesh networking, natural interfaces [mirrors, portals], etc. etc.)

Croquet does indeed look very fascinating. However, I read their draft license, and it appears to have an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL. I really, really hope they address this incompatibility, as croquet is something that could become a defacto lingua franca of an immersive 3d, collaborative internet. It is something that Blender, for example, could embrace ... were its licensing to be GPL compatible.

However, if they inadvertantly freeze out a major portion of the free software world, they will be doing both themselves and the rest of us a disservice, along the lines of the most recent xfree licensing debacle that led to the xorg fork (and xfree's subsequent deprication by nearly every Linux and GNU distribution).

That would be a terrible shame.

Croquet does indeed look very fascinating. However, I read their draft license, and it appears to have an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL. I really, really hope they address this incompatibility, as croquet is something that could become a defacto lingua franca of an immersive 3d, collaborative internet. It is something that Blender, for example, could embrace ... were its licensing to be GPL compatible.

However, if they inadvertantly freeze out a major portion of the free software world, they will be doing both themselves and the rest of us a disservice, along the lines of the most recent xfree licensing debacle that led to the xorg fork (and xfree's subsequent deprication by nearly every Linux and GNU distribution).

That would be a terrible shame.

The verbal description of the project just sounds like generic marketing-speak, but be sure to check out the screenshots. It does look like a truly impressive system. Ambitious, cool, and definitely innovative.

In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines."

He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.

I'm glad they've released it. I don't think they've yet fully tapped the 3rd dimension and I myself am not sure how to use it to bring about more than just eye candy and actually improve usabilty but I'm looking forward to seeing what the open source community can come up with to make it more compelling.

Perhaps the people working on the Open Croquet project might have some useful input (check in the download section for the pdf documentation).

-bullshit, you're soaking in it!

Well, if more people used Smalltalk, we might see more interesting applications. Stuff that C# and Java people find revolutionnary has been in Smalltalk for a long time now, just get ahead of your time, use Smalltalk.

Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:

Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.

Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.

kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).

well then check this out... http://www.opencroquet.org/

Opencroquet as discussed here is all this and less - not a FPS, but none the less an interesting alternative to those other run-of-the-mill net-based 3d operating systems.

If you want to see where Kay's latest thinking is taking him, you can see the evolution of Squeak into a more experimental phase of collaborative computing, Croquet. See also the manual.

A really big deal is made about this project's ability to "unlock the potential of this technology to enhance the entire user experience" and such as well as acknowledging the importance of communication through out the few pages with any info. It's just a shame that none of their "assumptions" are adhered to in the design of their own website.

As for stating that "it is our full intention to make Croquet into as high a quality a product as you will find anywhere, commercial or not.[snip] This isn't just a promise; it's just what we do.", maybe the same intentions should be directed towards the presentation of their communication.

I'm not going to get started on the documentation only being available in .PDF!

A really big deal is made about this project's ability to "unlock the potential of this technology to enhance the entire user experience" and such as well as acknowledging the importance of communication through out the few pages with any info. It's just a shame that none of their "assumptions" are adhered to in the design of their own website.

As for stating that "it is our full intention to make Croquet into as high a quality a product as you will find anywhere, commercial or not.[snip] This isn't just a promise; it's just what we do.", maybe the same intentions should be directed towards the presentation of their communication.

I'm not going to get started on the documentation only being available in .PDF!

Hmm, the main link was slashdotted, so I tried the OS's website http://www.opencroquet.org. Maybe they should change their main graphic to the "Way Cool screenshot" rather than the Monet looking Croquet game they have going on right now. They might garner a bit more interest.