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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"
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.
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.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
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!
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
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.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
From the License:
.... i tried version 1.0 long time ago and it was a very nice IDE.
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,
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.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad