Smalltalk

And so I rolled out of Linkert Labs into Xerox PARC.

And I was working on really early graphical user interfaces and working with Smalltalk and Logo and a lot of these things that Steve had seen, which became the Lisa, which was the first graphical user interface that he built, and then ultimately the Macintosh.

At least that was the name after his daughter.

Yes.

He treated it as a black box experiment, refusing to look at a single line of the generated C plus plus code.

We have been promised end user programming for forty years with things like Lisp and Smalltalk.

It never really materialized beyond Excel spreadsheets.

Now anyone can literally speak their custom software into existence.

We're gonna have fourth generation languages.

Lisp was once upon a time presented, Smalltalk was presented as these environments that would let regular people write their own applications, and none of it came true in the sense beyond, like, Microsoft Access databases or Excel spreadsheets.

That, those are end user programming environments, but it's nothing like what we're able to do now.

And then, I mean, I'm not even talking about end user.

The final system depends on the components that remain rather than every detour it took to get there.

And the deep idea is that a live system can experiment without making every detour permanent history.

The guarantees have boundaries.

Plugin authors must provide correct inverses.

This was IDE from IBM.

And it was Smalltalk-based.

And I had a similar problem with that because you could only see methods.

So if you click on a method, you saw a source code for the method, but not the entire class.

And he was the father of object-oriented computing.

He's the guy, he invented Smalltalk.

And so he's just an icon.

And as I recall, I can't remember, I think we had around 100 people in that division.