Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means.<p>I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum.<p>Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.
For me, Smalltalk's "wow" moment was the concept of a persistently running image, with the developer's job being to mould and manipulate it into the shape s/he wants.
Ive always "dreamed" of having something like the ST image but backed by persistent virtual memory, not simply RAM.<p>(Crudely) mmap the ST image to a 100GB file and just change pages. Let the OS flush the pages back and forth.<p>Maybe full boat, heap sweeping GCs would be Bad as it pages the entirety of the heap in and out. But we have (had) lots of RAM these days. We have generational GCs that leave idle stuff alone. Its no doubt impractical, but I think it would be neat to have the entirety of my historical email in the global "mailbox" array, and I can build indexes off it as I wished. But the mail isn't "on disk", it's all marshalled up as first class objects.<p>I don't know enough about it, no doubt it "won't work", but the idea of simply mapping the entire, large, ST VM heap to a persistent backing store, just be interesting I would think.<p>Dangerous too, as there is a demarcation between "running image" and "saved image". But, still think it could be interesting.
I'm also interested in this and made decent progress on a git-style content addressed image where everything is identified by hash and residency determines what's in memory. For example, there's a filesystem on the image that works this way and you can page over the "cold" non-resident bytes for very large files that you would not want to hold in memory.<p>You don't persist the state of the full image continuously to the host disk, but any given state (new programs, new runtime state, filesystem) can be saved via a delta, not a full rewrite, due to this representation.<p>So this is a little different than what you are talking about, but I'd say it's possible.
Sounds a somewhat like GemStone/S<p>I think also IBM has or had somewhat similar concepts.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone/S" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone/S</a>
There are Lisps with similar semantics. It faded (further) out of popularity for a number of reasons, but it still has its niche.
Additionally, although not the same, this kind of relates to JIT caches as well.
Which Lisps were those? I'm kinda interested in this space.
It's not widely known, but GNU Emacs works like this.<p>When you launch the Emacs editor, you're loading an Emacs Lisp image that was populated at build time by running Lisp code, with the resident Lisp definitions "dumped" to make an image file.<p>The image file used to actually be the `emacs` executable you'd run, using a clever but non-portable mechanism called `unexec` to make an executable.<p>But as of version 27.1 (in 2020), the image file is separate from the executable for portability reasons.
All Common Lisps can do that, though it is not a part of the standard. See e.g. (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die)
CL and Janet both come to mind as supporting image-based deployment.
The only mainstream-ish language where that still happens? R. Too bad, there's a lot more use cases for this sort of thing now - versioning, anything non-persistent agents touch, collaboration, auditable enterprise LOB. It's 2026, why are we (or our agents) still writing serialization code? Even if the AI's write the boilerplate, the state management fragility is often a tax/risk.
I wish this didn’t go out of fashion as much as it did. An environment that you perturb makes more sense in a lot of ways than a “tear it down and restart” model.
I think the gnarlier part is that it reveals how much (and how error prone) initialization code is. When objects start glued together in the right structure a lot becomes magically easier to deal with.
I'm considering this for my language but it's a lot more complex to implement (especially with today's ecosystems) and I keep wondering if it's worth it.
Imagine inheriting not your colleague’s code, but his entire machine. Then you discover this machine also is the production environment.
Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten.<p>All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.
Lisp is not "forgotten". It's quite alive, kicking and running [big] circles.<p>Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions.<p>Apple, Walmart, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon - they all use Clojure. Google and Grammarly use Common Lisp.<p>Check the GitHub language stats and be surprised to see Emacs Lisp among the visible top. There's so much Elisp on GitHub alone - it's just effing crazy. That fact alone at least should be surprising. Remember? This is a not a general-purpose language - it's made for one and only thing, tis a damn configuration language for a text editor. And no, it isn't "some old stuff", check r/emacs - new packages get announced daily! I'm not even exaggerating - new stuff for Emacs comes every single day. Who the heck are all these psychos? Have they not realized how "forgotten" and "dead" Lisp was?<p>Seriously though, Lisp dialects are enormously practical, it is inconceivable today to find a runtime where you just can't run stuff built with a Lisp. And Lispers keep adding more - Janet, Jank, Jolt, Fennel, Clojure-Dart, Cljbang, Squint - all are pretty young, yet already not some "useless toys" - they're used to build real stuff.
I find that lamentation a bit funny, because the list in practice is never really complete. For instance, you forgot the mighty Prolog. Surely, tcl belongs on there too.
Also SNOBOL/Icon.
The more of them you explore, the more insight you get. The list does not have to be complete. It just needs to list some languages, that are truly different in how they work and what the ideas behind them are.
I blame the unknown unknowns. I don’t haven’t learned Prolog yet. Alas, enlightenment still eludes me.<p>(Agreed that TCL is pretty cool)
And that's completely natural. Compare it with woodworking.<p>Yes, some people would dive deep into the craft and create works of art, exquisite furniture and tools they need to make it even better.<p>But those are the few. For the most of woodworkers this is just something they somehow learned to do on a level needed to be able to get a job and make living.
Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder.<p>I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently.<p>Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.
From what I've seen... I think if I were writing business applications, I'd reach for Elixir... if I were writing something lower level like communication software, I'd reach for Erlang.<p>I have written a fair amount of Elixir (and targeting business applications) and I think Elixir's expressiveness lends itself well to making more abstract models of the business processes and data seen in solving business problems. However, writing Elixir I find you end up reading a lot of Erlang and in certain problem spaces I could imagine the appeal over Elixir. I could absolutely see where if I were writing more technically oriented programs.... programs closer to the hardware in some ways or programs designed to communicate with other programs (protocols, etc.) I could see Erlang as being a more clear and direct language in these circumstances.<p>All of this is very hand-wavy, but it's my impression.
For me, Elixir misses the mark. If you're an unc with a background in Ruby or that era of webdev, I can see the appeal. It's a familiar set dressing. I don't have that background, I much prefer the syntactic structure of Erlang's psuedo-horn clauses. Both for similar familiarity reasons (I knew Prolog before I touched Erlang), as well as a general preference for the simplicity.
> <i>If you're an unc with a background in Ruby or that era of webdev</i><p>Millennials catching strays I see.
The similarity of Ruby and Elixir is only extremely superficial and betrays your lack of familiarity with the language.
I didn't imply otherwise, nor is the story different on the Erlang-Prolog axis (actually it's even more pronounced there.) I literally called it "set dressing". Where I think you go off the rails is that you're conflating surface-level things with irrelevance. Which isn't really true, especially in matters of taste.<p>I find this to be a very strange thing to get defensive about. It's not exactly a subtle part of Elixir's history. It was pretty well documented to be born out of the creator's dissatisfaction with concurrency in Ruby, and simultaneously, for a more Ruby-like language on the BEAM. That doesn't mean it's literally Ruby-on-the-BEAM (which was originally attempted, and didn't work out), however mistaking that as cause to dismiss the link between the two and the carry-over appeal for developers is an unsound overcorrection.
Phoenix is a big part of the appeal of Elixir, independently of the differences between Elixir and Erlang.
While I appreciate guest languages for bringing new ideas to specific language platforms, at the end of the day I rather use those that are developed alonside the platform, hence Erlang instead of Elixir, at least if I would be ever doing something with it again.<p>Last time I touched Erlang, "Learn you some Erlang for great good!" was fresh out of the printers.
I loved Erlang. I want to use it, those who can master mnesia natively are a powerful wizard/ess. I've only touched the surface and seen it's raw power.<p>I've just not had time to learn further. As swapping between languages when trying to complete my original Tcl project is tricky. I'm now poking around with Crystal.<p>A rookie example of erlang and converting strings to base16. I posted in haste a while ago on Tcl's IRC but fun. Never did implement the teddy bear colour.<p><a href="http://paste.tclers.tk/6165" rel="nofollow">http://paste.tclers.tk/6165</a>
Elixir brings mostly a new syntax, and little more. I rather use Gleam IF i really need to use the BEAM.<p>Other than that, vanilla Erlang is THE way to go.
No love for APL?
And Prolog and Assembly!
Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.
> almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk<p>Is this underselling the role of Self in JS’s prototype-based object system, or saying that a prototype-based object system is not one of the good parts?
And some months ago I was flirting with the idea of "Smalltalk and Erlang had a baby" and have Smalltalk syntax to an actor environment ran by a Erlang VM style. Plus some insanely cool ideas about a causal debugger for distributed bugs.<p>The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.<p>Although, thinking long term and for understendabilitymaxxin and reliabilitymaxxin it might still be worth having something like that.<p>Since Smalltalk can be so close to english and Erlang VM so reliable, humans and LLMs should thrive on it.
<i>I was flirting with the idea ... Plus some insanely cool ideas ...
The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.</i><p>We've come to this. The mere existence of AI is discouraging people from pursuing creative ideas. This is a catastrophe! It's not just taking the fun out of life, it's destroying alternative futures we might have built.<p>There is this advice for dealing with tyrants and would-be tyrants: "Do not obey in advance." In your case that means pursuing and implementing your exciting ideas.<p><i>... it might still be worth having something like that.</i><p>Yes! Good luck with it!
> we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.<p>Or... Writing a compiler from a large language test suite is already an LLM sweet spot. Writing code which is atypically pretty and readable isn't... but there's at least a possibility of that changing someday.<p>Imagine a future Lisp-ish culture of "write code to communicate <i>with humans</i> - prioritize readability - machine execution is incidental" and "don't merely solve a problem - write a language for the problem space (and keep it cleanly updated)"... but moving at LLM-catalyzed speed. So <i>much</i> fun.
Metalworking, lathes, precision tooling, are all way more valuable skills and tools today than they ever were before the industrial revolution.<p>I suspect that over time a good grasp of fundamentals and great tooling will only get more valuable in software as well as automation expands, in whichever form.<p>Automation expands the demand for skills. It can never diminish it. Required variety indicates that complexity doesn't go away with automation, and at some level someone will have to understand and make decisions about complex issues. You can't automate all the way down. Or, put another way, everything is already automated all the way down. The expansion of automation as we perceive it is merely the growth of complexity over new dimensions.<p>Or put a third way: automation means two different things: constraint and liberty. The confusion arising from not discerning which one is in force makes it seems like one can grow unbounded. Liberty requires constraint and vice versa.
I also had Squeak in my curriculum! From what I remember it had a unique object hierarchy or something like
I would give a lot for a version of Squeak which could instantiate standard GUI controls and easily compile to a stand-alone binary or HTML page w/ included JavaScript.
This looks like Gilad Bracha's Newspeak: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak_(programming_language...</a>
Objective-Smalltalk with Interscript. <a href="https://objective.st" rel="nofollow">https://objective.st</a><p>It ain't a version of Squeak, though.
SmallJS (<a href="https://small-js.org" rel="nofollow">https://small-js.org</a>) does what you want mostly.
In the sense that a standalone desktop app can be made with NW.js.
For the HTML/JS side see <a href="https://amber-lang.net" rel="nofollow">https://amber-lang.net</a> but not updated for a few years
I didn't understand programming at all until I read about (not even tried) Smalltalk. And it's because of Smalltalk I write Ruby today.<p>My favourite thing about it is the lack of "reserved words" - just a handful of punctuation marks. It's incredibly pure - almost all of the syntax is "send this message to this object".
I learned about Smalltalk from Ruby, because DHH recommended a book about Smalltalk back in the day. I really enjoy Smalltalk-style OOP, but at the same time it can be so different to Java enterprise OOP with all its patterns.<p>Nowadays I write a lot of TypeScript and prefer having a type system (especially for agentic coding), but Ruby is one of my favorite languages to write myself :)
> <i>Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.</i><p>That's E and Self erasure.
As a Ruby developer this video about Pharo smalltalk made me a smalltalk believer — not surprising because Ruby was heavily inspired by smalltalk.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o</a>
If you think of it as message oriented it makes so much more sense.
Georgia Tech in the Mark Guzdial days?
I thought JS had a lot of Scheme inspiration?
>Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.<p>Like what, exactly? I'm genuinely curious. There is no root object or message passing in JS, and the OO aspects are only incidentally bolted on (classes don't actually exist, prototypal inheritance was an afterthought), named params are newer sugar, and polymorphism is a struggle due to all of the above. I've always thought of JS as what Crockford himself said: "a Lisp in C's clothing".
Ignore the syntax for a moment. Minus Javascript, HTML + CSS is a green screen terminal with better fonts and image support. Message passing (fetch, XMLHttpRequest, polling, streaming, etc...) is how you build something that feels like a real tool out a system where the sandbox gets in the way of everything you want to hold locally.
I agree, but JS has evolved so far, that when using TypeScript, you can mostly ignore the underlying mismatch.
A big influence for modern js is chained enumeration, like forEach
The main thing you’ll learn is that actually the static and inflexible abstractions of an operating system do a lot to protect the system integrity and prevent everything from blowing up. Many smalltalk VMs rely on recovery features for a reason