Smalltalk Today — Squeak, Pharo, and What Survives

smalltalk1-7 closed with a promise: Smalltalk didn't disappear. This final chapter is where it actually lives today — and the place to step back and see the full shape of what this course has been tracing across seven prior chapters.

Squeak — Carrying the Dynabook Forward

Squeak, created in 1996 by a team that included Alan Kay himself, alongside Dan Ingalls and others — the same names from smalltalk1-2 — is an open-source Smalltalk implementation built specifically to continue exploring the original Dynabook vision, not just to be "a modern Smalltalk" in the abstract. It's a direct continuation of the specific educational mission Kay started with in 1972.

Etoys, Squeak's own educational environment, uses direct manipulation and a simplified, visual, tile-based scripting approach rather than typed message-send syntax — genuinely closer in spirit to Scratch, the much later and far more widely known educational programming environment, than to a typical professional programming setup. Worth naming honestly: Scratch itself was directly influenced by Squeak and Etoys' own work — one more thread of invisible legacy, in the same spirit as smalltalk1-5's own MVC material.

Squeak has been used in real, deployed educational programs, including the One Laptop Per Child project — a genuine, direct, modern-day echo of the original Dynabook mission: cheap, accessible computers built specifically for children's learning, arriving decades after Kay's own 1972 proposal.

Pharo — A Modern, Professional Open-Source Smalltalk

Pharo, forked from Squeak in 2008, is explicitly aimed at professional software development rather than education specifically — an actively maintained, modern open-source Smalltalk with a real, if niche, community and genuine production use cases, not purely a museum piece or teaching toy.

Pharo still carries forward the live image and class-browser model from smalltalk1-4 largely unchanged in spirit, while building real modern tooling — package management, testing frameworks — attempting to bridge some of smalltalk1-7's own honest gaps.

What Survives, Restated

A brief, explicit walk back through this course's own full arc: smalltalk1-1 set the "before" state — pre-object programming, and Simula 67 as the genuine technical precursor. smalltalk1-2 gave that precursor a motivating reason to become something more — the Dynabook vision. smalltalk1-3 delivered the radical philosophy that vision actually demanded: everything is an object, everything is a message, with no exceptions anywhere, not even for control flow. smalltalk1-4 showed the environment that philosophy required — a live, persistent image, not compiled files. smalltalk1-5 traced the visible, still-everywhere-in-use legacy — MVC and the GUI itself. smalltalk1-6 traced the direct language lineage — Objective-C's syntax, Ruby's philosophy — while honestly correcting an earlier overclaim about how much of OOP really traces back here. smalltalk1-7 gave the honest account of why the commercial market didn't reward the most philosophically coherent option. This chapter closes the loop.

The Real Closing Point

Object-oriented programming as most working programmers understand and use it today is not an independent invention by Java, or C++, or Ruby, or any of its more commercially successful descendants. It's a direct, traceable inheritance from a specific research effort, motivated by a specific, still only partially realized vision — truly democratized, child-accessible personal computing — conducted by a specific, identifiable group of people at a specific place and time.

Most programmers writing classes, calling methods, and relying on inheritance every single day have never heard any of this history. In a strange way, that's the most complete measure of how deeply this work actually won — even while the specific language that carried it lost the commercial battle described in smalltalk1-7.

Reflection Questions