Largest Provider of Commercial Smalltalk
Cincom is one of the largest commercial providers of Smalltalk, with twice as many customers and partners as other commercial providers.
Tom Nies
What is the Smalltalk Programming Language?
Smalltalk is a reflective, object-oriented programming language known for its simplicity, dynamic nature, and highly interactive development environment. It was designed in the 1970s at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and has since influenced many modern programming languages. Key features and characteristics of the Smalltalk programming language include:- Object-Oriented: Smalltalk is a pure object-oriented language, meaning that everything in Smalltalk is an object, including numbers, characters, and even classes themselves. Objects communicate with each other by sending messages, which triggers the execution of methods associated with the receiving object.
- Dynamic Typing: Smalltalk uses dynamic typing, where the types of variables are determined at runtime. This allows for flexibility and late binding, as objects can be assigned to variables without explicitly specifying their types.
- Reflection: Smalltalk supports powerful reflection capabilities, allowing programs to examine and modify their own structure and behavior at runtime. This enables tasks such as introspection, metaprogramming, and creating dynamic systems.
- Image-Based Development: Smalltalk’s development environment is based on an image, which is a snapshot of the entire system’s state, including objects, classes, and methods. Developers work within this image, making changes, adding new code, and interacting with objects in a highly interactive manner.
- Messaging and Method Dispatch: Smalltalk uses message passing for communication between objects. Objects receive messages and dispatch them to the appropriate methods based on the receiver’s class hierarchy. This promotes loose coupling and enables polymorphism.
- Garbage Collection: Smalltalk incorporates automatic garbage collection, relieving developers from manual memory management. The runtime system automatically reclaims memory that is no longer in use, simplifying memory management and reducing the risk of memory-related bugs.
- Uniform Syntax and Syntax Simplicity: Smalltalk has a uniform and consistent syntax, with a simple and minimalistic set of keywords and operators. The syntax is designed to be highly readable and expressive, emphasizing the clarity of code.
- Live Coding: Smalltalk’s development environment supports live coding, allowing developers to modify and experiment with code while the program is running. This promotes an interactive and iterative development process, enabling quick feedback and rapid prototyping.
