Dwight Hughes Website

Dwight Hughes

One of my primary goals with this site is to put online many of the classic papers, research, and resources about the Smalltalk environment -- covering its history, development, implementation, application, and fundamental ideas and concepts. As such, it will certainly be an ongoing project. Along the way, my secondary (but perhaps more important) goal is to bring forward a number of the great ideas and great beginnings that have been neglected or lost in the stampede toward the general state of mediocrity we now "enjoy".

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Dan Ingalls from the BYTE August 1981 Special Issue on Smalltalk -- the article that I consider to be the centerpiece of the entire issue, and the one that truly made me understand what Smalltalk as both a language and an environment was all about. Attention newbie Smalltalkers: this paper is required reading. I have several more articles from the August 1981 BYTE in process and will (eventually) make them available.

From the Blue Book -- Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson -- I have the complete Part 4: The Implementation, Chapters 26-30 . It defines a complete reference implementation for the original Smalltalk-80 Virtual Machine (16-bit) that was required to run the original Smalltalk-80 Virtual Image. The reference code is all in Smalltalk and was written for clarity, not performance -- any optimizations were left to the implementor.

Fabrik: A Visual Programming Environment by Dan Ingalls, Scott Wallace, Yu-Ying Chow, Frank Ludolph, and Ken Doyle is online! It describes a powerful visual construction kit of computational and UI components based on a bidirectional dataflow model that can be "wired" together interactively to create non-trivial programs -- all of which can then be directly executed - or compiled into objects as part of the underlying Smalltalk environment if desired.

The Smalltalk-76 Programming System: Design and Implementation by Dan Ingalls. Smalltalk-76 was the first version of Smalltalk to have a syntax and system design easily recognizable as Smalltalk to those familiar with Smalltalk-80.

I will be adding various information specifically about Squeak -- the free, open source implementation of the Smalltalk-80 environment that finally begins to fulfill some of the original promise and potential of Smalltalk (and which finally gave me enough incentive to actually get this site going) .

Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself by Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, and Alan Kay. The story of how and why Squeak was created. Presented at OOPSLA '97. Outlines the process of turning the Blue Book VM spec into a practical, portable 32-bit VM for Squeak.
The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Squeak Primitives by Stephen Travis Pope. How to create your own special extensions to the Squeak VM.

If you have any comments about my site -- especially suggestions for classic papers you would most like to see online -- please send them to me at dwighth@ipa.net .

This site has been created using standard HTML to be equally accessible from all common browsers - no special browser-specific or OS-specific extensions or components have been used. If you have any problems viewing any part of my site please let me know.