
Squeak 5 is out - Fice
http://news.squeak.org/2015/08/12/squeak-5-is-out/
======
mark_l_watson
I should try out version 5. After many years of using Squeak I jumped to the
fork Pharo for reasons I now forget.

I blogged many years ago that if/when I retired I might mostly only use Squeak
for the rest of my life for learning/hacking projects. I have largely used
Lisp languages since the early 1980s, but the Smalltalk environment is so much
fun!

Congrats to the Squeak team.

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
With Lisp (mostly ironscheme, guile and racket for me) and smalltalk, I have
this feeling that just about every other language has been playing catch-up.

It is just recently that some scripting languages have started giving me the
same feeling of bliss.

~~~
pjmlp
Just delve into the Xerox PARC archives of Smalltalk, Interlisp-D and
Mesa/Cedar and you will see how much catch-up is still left.

It is really a pity that those ideas didn't spread as they should have been.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I hear you. I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in the 1980s and the development
environment was awesome, even by today's standards.

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agentgt
I'm just curious how people share projects with modern Squeak these days. I
learned Squeak at GaTech and while I some what appreciated the language I
really hated Squeaks tools and development style (basically monkey patching
and sending big changesets and by god I want to use emacs not Squeaks
Mattel/Fisher price kids editor... I'm sure its better now).

Sadly Squeak was the start of my slow and gradual hate of OOP languages (Java
later on did not help) but it did have some really cool things like traits and
continuations.

~~~
jcromartie
Pharo is an effort to make a "grown-up" Squeak. It's hard to get the kind of
interaction that makes Smalltalk work when you're inside a general-purpose
text editor. When I'm working in Smalltalk, even though it's always a "toy"
program, I feel like I'm sort of reaching into the computer's inner world and
fiddling with things in a way you can't do with a plain old text editor.

~~~
wtbob
> When I'm working in Smalltalk, even though it's always a "toy" program, I
> feel like I'm sort of reaching into the computer's inner world and fiddling
> with things in a way you can't do with a plain old text editor.

There's always
[http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/](http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/)

------
olsonjeffery
I so often realize, when I look at my efforts in my own recreational
programming, that I want to recreate and recapture the joy of working in
smalltalk (which I've only ever done recreationally w/ Squeak/Pharo). Just
with tools/APIs that I'm more comfortable with in my day-to-day programming.

Also lisp.

~~~
stijlist
If you'd like to see an attempt at the best of both worlds (Smalltalk and
Lisp), check out Robert Krahn's work on Cloxp:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQvvgzvPgQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQvvgzvPgQI)

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st-enthusiast
I remember Squeak used to have a bunch of different window colors for
different tools, which always made Squeak look like a toy unfit for serious
work.

I downloaded the latest, and now there seems to be uniformity in the UI, with
a single window style for all tools. It looks like Pharo has pushed them in
the right direction.

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asb
"Spur is just a stepping stone to a more ambitious goals planned over the next
five years." Does anybody know of a document describing these goals?

~~~
lmz
These ones maybe: [http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/cog-
projects/](http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/cog-projects/) (linked from the
Release Notes:
[http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6207](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6207) )

~~~
gecko
And just to give the quick summary, Spur enables:

    
    
      * More immediate types. The classic Squeak/Pharo image type only allows for
        objects, strings, and integers as immediates, if I recall correctly. 
        Spur adds individual characters, floats (soon), and some other stuff
        I'm spacing. Since all Smalltalk values are nominally heap-based,
        having more immediates is a really big deal.
      * Allows for a segmented heap. For desktop apps, this isn't a big deal,
        but for server apps, it means that the VM can actually relinquish
        RAM.
      * Better object pinning, which makes FFI a lot easier.
      * A more GC-friendly design, that should enable a much faster GC pass.
    

The only downside, IIRC, is that the total image size grows by about 15%, but
that's a pretty good trade-off, given a normal image is usually in the tens of
megabytes.

~~~
needusername
Threaded FFI has been on that list for a long, long time as well.

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gmartres
What's the relationship between Squeak and Pharo? Do they have the same goals?

~~~
radiowave
Pharo is a fork of Squeak, loosely along the lines of "let's rip out and
replace as much old cruft as we can" vs. "let's maintain backwards
compatibility where reasonably possible", respectively.

The big news here, however, is the new VM and image format, and since Pharo
and Squeak have never diverged in that area, it's likely that Pharo will
benefit from these improvements as well.

~~~
gecko
It will indeed. The current plan (subject to change) is that Pharo 5 will ship
as Pharo 4 + Spur (32 bit), then Pharo 5.1 will be Pharo 4 + Spur (64 bit),
and then normal releases will resume. But as I said, that's just the current
plan, and so much has landed on the 5.0 branch already that I'm a bit dubious
they'll stick to that.

~~~
needusername
Isn't NativeBoost what's currently blocking the migration to Spur?

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pjmlp
Congratulations to the team.

I learned Smalltalk with Visual Works back in 1995, it was a great experience.

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fake-name
> a new segmented heap allows memory to be given back to the OS when its no
> longer needed, a great benefit for application servers.

 _Application servers_? Is anyone writing servers in squeak?

~~~
st-enthusiast
The people interested in that sort of thing left for Pharo long ago. The Pharo
platform seems much more practically-minded, and the website has some case
studies of businesses built using it:
[http://pharo.org/success](http://pharo.org/success)

~~~
small-talking
What makes you think no one is using Squeak as an application server?

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senorcastro
Will it run seaside?

~~~
st-enthusiast
It should. There is even an install script for it. But I believe the
development shifted to Pharo as the primary platform.

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aw3c2
What is it?

~~~
a3n
s|news.squeak.org/2015/08/12/squeak-5-is-out/|squeak.org|

