There is something I’ve never understood about Smalltalk, since reading about it in a book when I was a child, tho’ I have never used it “in anger”. I know that it is turtles-all-the-way-down, that you can break into the program at any time, inspect the state of your objects, even change the code, and resume running. This is obviously a dream come true for a researcher, whether in CS or in industry, an engineer simulating a system, an analyst modelling a market, and so on. I also know that there was no concept of writing source in text files and compiling them into a binary, the editor and the runtime are the same thing. But how do you deliver software to an end user who wouldn’t know a debugger if it bit them on the nose, and couldn’t care less what an object is? Was there a secret keystroke to turn all those features off and make it behave like “normal” software? Or was Smalltalk software only ever sold to sophisticated users who were programmers too?

There is something I’ve never understood about Smalltalk, since reading about it in a book when I was a child, tho’ I have never used it “in anger”. I know that it is turtles-all-the-way-down, that you can break into the program at any time, inspect the state of your objects, even change the code, and resume running. This is obviously a dream come true for a researcher, whether in CS or in industry, an engineer simulating a system, an analyst modelling a market, and so on. I also know that there was no concept of writing source in text files and compiling them into a binary, the editor and the runtime are the same thing. But how do you deliver software to an end user who wouldn’t know a debugger if it bit them on the nose, and couldn’t care less what an object is? Was there a secret keystroke to turn all those features off and make it behave like “normal” software? Or was Smalltalk software only ever sold to sophisticated users who were programmers too?

There is something I’ve never understood about Smalltalk, since reading about it in a book when I was a child, tho’ I have never used it “in anger”. I know that it is turtles-all-the-way-down, that you can break into the program at any time, inspect the state of your objects, even change the code, and resume running. This is obviously a dream come true for a researcher, whether in CS or in industry, an engineer simulating a system, an analyst modelling a market, and so on. I also know that there was no concept of writing source in text files and compiling them into a binary, the editor and the runtime are the same thing. But how do you deliver software to an end user who wouldn’t know a debugger if it bit them on the nose, and couldn’t care less what an object is? Was there a secret keystroke to turn all those features off and make it behave like “normal” software? Or was Smalltalk software only ever sold to sophisticated users who were programmers too?

There is something I’ve never understood about Smalltalk, since reading about it in a book when I was a child, tho’ I have never used it “in anger”. I know that it is turtles-all-the-way-down, that you can break into the program at any time, inspect the state of your objects, even change the code, and resume running. This is obviously a dream come true for a researcher, whether in CS or in industry, an engineer simulating a system, an analyst modelling a market, and so on. I also know that there was no concept of writing source in text files and compiling them into a binary, the editor and the runtime are the same thing. But how do you deliver software to an end user who wouldn’t know a debugger if it bit them on the nose, and couldn’t care less what an object is? Was there a secret keystroke to turn all those features off and make it behave like “normal” software? Or was Smalltalk software only ever sold to sophisticated users who were programmers too?