A lot of people don't know that Smalltalk heavily influenced NeXTSTEP and Objective-C. You'll see a lot of it in Interface Builder->Project Builder->XCode with the GUI serialization (and of course Obj-C message passing and general dynamic nature).

This is a good history:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-deep-history-of-your-ap...

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar, Interlisp-D inside Xerox.

Mesa and Cedar influenced Niklaus Wirth to come up with Modula-2/Lillith and Oberon.

Which had an influence on Rob Pike, on how he developed ACME for Plan 9.

Meanwhile StrongTalk, and Objective-C ended up influencing how Java came to be, and its approach to JIT compilation.

On another track Smalltalk ends up influencing Self design, which ends up having an effect on how V8 JIT was designed.

Then there is Ruby as well.

Pity that with all of this, many still never tried what actually means to use Smalltalk.

Note that Interface Builder started as a Lisp prototype, before being acquired by NeXT.

https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...

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gumby 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.

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NetMageSCW 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mesa and Cedar interested me as I got into programming languages, but I was more into Trellis/Owl (and had copies of the documentation provided to me by DEC SRC after I wrote to them).

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rjsw 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The LeLisp version of Interface Builder that JMH wrote at INRIA predates the timeline in your link.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That link is the official story I am aware of, where can I read about that one?

	▲	rjsw an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have a paper copy of a paper (in French) about SOS Interface. Had scans of this at one point. There is a bit more of a timeline in a talk [1] he gave at INRIA a couple of years before he died. [1] https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...

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Rochus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar

In what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The Xerox papers on digital archive, I can try to hunt them down, see for example the one on XDE Tajo experience for Mesa.

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Rochus an hour ago | parent [-]

MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.

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pjmlp 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes my claim is about the IDE experience shared across all Xerox PARC environments, and how it affected the design of each language individually.

I will hunt down the papers.

	▲	Rochus 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said OS and applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.

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NetMageSCW 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I got to meet Brad Cox at college when he came to visit one of my professors (who I worked with after hours). I find it interesting that instead of the objects as tiny computers of Kay he thought of software ICs and then pulled from Smalltalk to implement those concepts in Objective-C, but in the simplest way possible (almost just combining the two side-by-side) as opposed to Stroustrup being more heavily influenced by Similar (especially as he was actually building simulations) and extending C into objects to gain performance that Simula didn’t have.

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Rochus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

An another lot of people doesn't know that Smalltalk-76 onwards implemented the Simula 67 object model (as the first language in the given completeness), which represented a fundamental departure from Smalltalk-72. See the Ingalls 1978 and 2020 papers for more information (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335, both more interesting and relevant than the one in the title, written by the person who invented most of the technology we today know as Smalltalk-80).