Visual Age for Smalltalk For Non-Comm Use

paugq writes " IBM has released Visual Age 6.01 for Smalltalk for free for non-commercial use. You can download it here, it's available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc (registration needed). Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC during the 1970s"

Comments

Visual Age Smalltalk

[kzadot]

This is great news, smalltalk is one of the original "pure" OO languages. The OO extensions in Objective C are based on smalltalk.

For those of you who have up until now been using Squeak, may be interested in upgrading to a more serious tool, now that its available.

More info here. Sorry, couldnt find any screenshots.

For Those Not On AIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows..

[swdunlop]

There are two major open source implementations of Smalltalk commonly available today: GNU/Smalltalk and Squeak. GNU/Smalltalk is more server-oriented, and does not support Smalltalk's traditional MVC GUI, espousing a new system based off Tk. It is fairly fast, and somewhat lighter weight than Squeak, making it a better choice for headless applications like application servers. Squeak is, at the moment, mind-blowingly huge, but it provides both the venerable MVC GUI and Morphic, which is derived from Sun Microsystems' Self programming language. It also has been ported to many non-Unix platforms, like Win32, WinCe, MacOS 9, etc.

Cincom has had a non commercial version for years

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com has had thier non commercial for years.

Who says this is free for non-commercial use?

[JLyle]

IBM has released Visual Age 6.01 for Smalltalk for free for non-commercial use...

I don't doubt your word, but I am having trouble finding any evidence to support the claim that this is "free for non-commercial use". I started at the home page for Visual Age for Smalltalk, and clicked through a few of the links from that page, but didn't find anything to suggest that it's free. I also subscribed to the comp.lang.smalltalk and ibm.software.vasmalltalk newsgroups and scanned the posts there for the last few months but didn't see any announcements along these lines.

So before I go through the hassle of signing up for an "account" with IBM, and then downloading and installing the software, could someone please provide a pointer to the information about how it's licensed for non-commercial use?

Re:Who says this is free for non-commercial use?

[SeaGK]

From the License:

You may 1) use the Program only for internal evaluation or testing purposes (emphasis mine) and 2) make and install a reasonable number of copies of the Program in support of such use, unless IBM identifies a specific number of copies in the documentation accompanying the Program. The terms of this license apply to each copy you make.

so, No, it is not FREE it is only gratis (no money) for testing.
You should give it a try though, .... i tried version 1.0 long time ago and it was a very nice IDE.

Other Smalltalk's available for *nix

[Lord of the Fries]

There are other Smalltalk flavors available for *nix platforms as well.

• Squeak
  
• GNU Smalltalk for one.
  
• VisualWorks
  
• Smalltalk/X
  

I've used 'em all, each has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on what you're trying to do. They're all Smalltalk though, and that makes 'em great!

Re:Smalltalk

[RevAaron]

Yup, Smalltalk is still used. Obviously, it's not used as widely as C++ or Java, but there are still a number of folks using it. From industrial control (embedded smalltalk!) to huge "mission-critical, enterprise-wide" applications; from schmucks like me who use it as their desktop and GUI system to college classes using it to teach the fundamentals of OOP; from corporate prototyping to acedemic research.

It's not the most visible language, but it also doesn't have the marketing cashflow behind it like Java, or the legacy mindshare of C++. But then again, there are a lot of systems in the background doing work that we never hear about- OS/2 running ATMs, Lisp running banks, etc etc.

Umm, this isn't anything new...

[RevAaron]

While I'm very happy to see Slashdot giving my favorite language a little publicity, I can't see what is new about this.

I thought perhaps this was something new from IBM- a new package or a new license for a non-commercial version of VAST. Perhaps that is there long term intent, but I just downloaded and installed it, and lo and behold the start-up splash screen informs me that this is an evaluation version. IBM has had evaluation versions available for download from their site (or a CD from IBM, free) for a long time. Looks like the same license and the same stuff.

That said, I hope it doesn't discourage anyone frmo trying it out- or possible trying out a free Smalltalk like Squeak. :)

The Spirit of Smalltalk

[RevAaron]

The Smalltalk philosophy and community is an interesting beast. Smalltalk has been about being open since before the copyleft, before the FSF or GNU- right about the time RMS was first being hired at the MIT AI lab.

Unlike most of the rest of the software world, Smalltalk is open to its core. I think of it as sort of psycholinguists for programming languages. Due to way Smalltalk works, the community grew into a culture of openness that C/C++ programmers don't know, even with licenses like the GPL.

You see, in a Smalltalk environment, the entire system is available to you, at your fingertips. It's all there, and it's all in Smalltalk. If I want to change the way the plus (+) operator works, I can. Since everything is an object in Smalltalk, and every operation a method, it's just a matter of having a look at the + method on the class Number. In Smalltalk, we notate that as Number>>#+. Which incidentally is also legitamate code- it returns a CompiledMethod object, which contains the compiled bytecode for that method. Or, if I wanted to change the way the Smalltalk system managed windows, I could just pop into the Window class. Nothing is hidden, nothing is kept from you, the developer/user- even on "proprietary" and commercial Smalltalks like VisualAge for Smalltalk and VisualWorks. The ability to change the way anything works, getting the source code for everything is something you don't get with most industrial-strength commercial systems. Definately cool, IMHO.

One exception is the virtual machine, which is often written in C and makes up a pretty small percentage of the Smalltalk system. Java tends to have a lot of what we think of as the "java system" in the VM or a VM extension, but most Smalltalk VMs are small.

Squeak takes this to the next level- Squeak's VM is written in Smalltalk, and then translated to C, and them compiled by gcc, etc. You can make modifications to the way you want your virtual machine to work, and the Squeak system manages the translation to C and compiling it to something your computer can understand.

Re:The Spirit of Smalltalk

[Piquan]

You see, in a Smalltalk environment, the entire system is available to you, at your fingertips.

The same is true of Lisp. I can look at the function slot of the + symbol to get the function. It's a compiled function object. I can use that object opaquely, or if I want to analyze it, I can call function-lambda-expression to recover the source (if it was compiled with debug info), or disassemble to get the assembly code.

The whole system is out there, in the open. I can change it, I can query it.

One company that made their living on Lisp was called Symbolics. They made Lisp Machines, aka lispms. These were specialized hardware platforms with processors designed to run Lisp very efficiently. Also, they came with an OS called Genera. Genera was a programmer's dream OS. I won't try to describe it here, because I couldn't do it justice; I'll just say that I started using Squeak because it reminded me of Genera.

Now, lispms were all about the openness. You could play with the smallest internal function you wanted to. They also came with almost all the source (I think missing just part of the boot loader). But that openness was bordered by your license agreement; you still couldn't share it with your neighbor.

Symbolics wasn't the first to make lispms. They started at the MIT AI lab. This was about the time that parts of the computer industry discovered that Lisp was a good thing. There was a sudden explosion of Lisp in the industry (much like the .com boom). Some of the lab hackers, led by Richard Greenblatt, formed a hacking company called Lisp Machines Incorporated, or LMI. This company was set up to support hackers, rather than maximize profits. (For this reason, they didn't take outside investors.)

While the company wasn't profit-driven, nobody wanted it to piledrive into the ground. So Greenblatt called in Russell Noftsker, who had more business sense. Nofstker promptly took Greenblatt's ideas and started his own company, Symbolics. The two were instantly bitter rivals.

Everybody at the AI lab was associated with one of the two companies, except for RMS. (Symbolics was entirely proprietary, and LMI-- while they wanted an open OS-- was fine with proprietary apps. RMS wouldn't camp with either of them.) LMI wanted hackers to work part-time at the lab, and part-time for LMI. The point of LMI was to support the lab hackers, and the culture. But Symbolics was about making money, and didn't care about the culture. They hired away all the hackers they could. Symbolics also leveled accusations about conflict of interest, and made all the LMI hackers leave the lab.

Almost overnight, the AI lab had been decimated. There's more to this story, but I think you get the idea. The once-open lab culture had been destroyed by ideas of proprietary business.

RMS was very sad to see this happen. He was the only hacker who hadn't left for LMI or Symbolics. This is why he started GNU: he wanted to recreate the culture of openness and freedom that he had known before.

I do believe that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies to programming languages; the design of the languages a programmer knows will strongly influence how he thinks about problems. But this story is a counterexample to the idea that openness in a language design engenders openness in other areas.

Problems with Smalltalks...

[teambpsi]

First off, I need to state that I'm a HUGE smalltalk fan/user/zealot....but....

Its a 'monolithic kernel' architecture.

There is of course the "stripping" process to pare down the image size, but frankly it still comes out pretty large

Of course, with the price of memory these days, its not so much of a concern anymore ;)

Seriously though, there was at one point some discussion of an embedded 'cpu', much like the BasicStamp system that would allow smalltalk on 'anything', not sure if it went anywhere

The other problem is one of Education! Very few (and i haven't checked recently) schools offer any educational courses that focus, let along USE Smalltalk.

Text books frequently use banking examples to attempt to show the advantages of using pure objects -- unfortunately banking requires near real-time performance, and traditionally most interpreted systems do not perform. Of course we have bigger badder processors to make up for that ;)

Also, the track-record for large-scale systems hasn't been what i'd call complimentary: Having spent some time working on "!ntegrator" for QWEST (then USWEST), I can tell you that the approach taken was next to dismal in terms of results after three years. Much of which is or has been replaced with either Web-based systems or J2EE.

Objective-C is a great migration/hybrid -- NeXT, and now hopefully Apple will show that.

Now, to its credit, and not to denigrate it any, I kind of see Smalltalk as a "LOGO for Adults" -- seems to be a good sort of tool for instruction.

Its safe to play (sandbox), responsive, and teaches some very important principals (like THINKING before you code ;)