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Stéphane Ducasse
Personal blog · stephane.ducasse.free.frprogrammingwriting
Stéphane Ducasse's personal blog at stephane.ducasse.free.fr covers programming and writing. Since 2008, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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76mentions?
47HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books18 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2008-08-03
- Smalltalk 80 – Blue Book (1983) [pdf]16 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2013-06-30
- Free Online SmallTalk Books8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-10-26
- /Teaching/CoursAnnecy/0506-Master/ForPresentations/Fortress-PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-05
- /FreeBooks/Gnu/ProgrammingUsingGnuSmalltalk.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-25
What Hacker News says?
From type systems theory point of view, a class is an extensible module that can be used as a variable. As mentioned in another reply, Java did not invent this, it was building upon Smalltalk and SELF, with a little bit of Objective-C on the side, and C++ like syntax. Try to create a single function in Smalltalk, or SELF. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html https://www.strongtalk.org/ https://selflanguage…
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on “Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition”Submitted Smalltalk 80 – Blue Book (1983) [pdf] as a story · 122 points
HN discussionMay 1988 -- Smalltalk/V 286 -- on IBM-PC, PS/2 or compatible, with an 80286 or 80386 "INTRODUCTION TO THE SMALLTALK/V 286 ENVIRONMENT" http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial...
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on “IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)”Submitted Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books as a story · 88 points
HN discussion> What's a good book for Simula or Smalltalk? For Smalltalk, just start with the Blue Book. It's so well written and complete -- and most of it still alive in current implementations -- that it's the best place to start. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
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on “Thousands of Facebook internal documents and emails published online”Submitted Free Online SmallTalk Books as a story · 48 points
HN discussionI wanted to add to this great recommendation. The blue book and other excellent out-of-print books on SmallTalk can be found here: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/
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on “Mezzano – An operating system written in Common Lisp”Submitted Free Online Smalltalk Books as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMore software development than CS, I was waaaaay too young to understand anything about CS but making computers do my bidding was very interesting. Microelectronics and the Personal Computer Scientific American 237, no. 3 (1977)(Sep.): 230-244. scans at https://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/xerox-parc-1970-8... Programming Your Own Computer , in Science Year, The World Book Annual Science Supplement, 183-195. (…
Comment linking /FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf
on “Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?”Submitted The Early History of Smalltalk – Alan Kay (1993) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionProgramming using GNU Smalltalk http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/Gnu/ProgrammingUsi...
Comment linking /FreeBooks/Gnu/ProgrammingUsingGnuSmalltalk.pdf
on “Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?”Submitted SmallTalk80: The language and its implementatin [book] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt seems like the code/system browser has essentially stayed the same since Smalltalk-80. See Figure 17.11 on page 298 (PDF page 320) of the blue book [1]. I've often wondered about "modernizing" it, or at least exploring other options for interacting with the source. Have there been attempts at this? This is pretty far down on my list of things to fund even if I were to win the lottery some day. But I like to think…
Comment linking /FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf
on “Pharo 9”Submitted Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe professor who taught me OOP wrote a book which I never read, but I am confident that he focuses on the concepts in the beginning: https://books.google.de/books?id=RAloBgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... Another good source of ebooks seems to be this page: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/ There you can find the Blue-Book which looks like a great resource too: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bl…
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on “OOP Is Dead, Long Live OOP”Submitted The Art and Science of Smalltalk as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a ton of practical Pharo books here https://books.pharo.org and Smalltalk books here http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
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on “Pharo 10”About a decade ago, I would have agreed with this 100%, and I still am fascinated and, quite frankly, awed by Racket and LOP (and looking forward to Racket Fest 2019 here in Berlin[1]). But. (You knew there was a "but"). While I don't quite agree with the assertion that with the right tooling (so: this tooling), creating a language is as easy as creating a library, I don't think it would solve our problems even if i…
Comment linking /FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOfHistory.pdf
on “Why Language-Oriented Programming? Why Racket?”Squeak or Pharo if you want the full image-based experience. Some distros come with Squeak but the packaging can be confused and the versions are often old. A slow and slightly janky but surprisingly useable Squeak experience can be had in a web browser at https://squeak.js.org/run/ . Older Squeak versions tend to run faster in SqueakJS. There are tutorials all over the place however as Smalltalk is a system that, l…
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on “Why Lisp?”Xerox controlled the whole stack, they invented it for their systems. So these workstations where an whole stack OS. You can read about their implementations on the links I provided before. Additionally, you can get the original Smalltalk-80 from from Stephane's web site. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html This is a very ruft idea how it felt to use a Smalltalk workstation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
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on “Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab”fwiw Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
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on “Sensible SQLite Defaults”I don’t know about emacs but your comment prompted a search for Smalltalk-80 docs: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.... On page 309 the `Metaclass Protocol` is defined. This class has a property “comment” [with value semantic of] ‘commentString’. So possibly they got it from Smalltalk. Don’t know.
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on “Go modules have a v2+ problem”Great that you like it - thanks! Some of the work of Stephen R. Kell at Kent University also covers language-based OSes and how some of their ideas might be adapted in Unix (see [1] and [2]). The Smalltalk-80 VM is specified in Smalltalk itself (in the "Blue Book" [3]) and the Squeak VM (a Smalltalk derivative) was written in a subset of Squeak itself [4]. The great thing is that it's a lot of fun to build this (at…
Comment linking /FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf
on “Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi”In this video, around the 38 minute mark, he shows a video in a slide, and I believe a few "slides" later runs a bridge simulation: https://vimeo.com/82301919 (I can't watch this with sound right now, so I'm not sure if he mentions using SmallTalk to present here) But as you can see, you're right: it's not obvious at all. Despite the valid complaints raised in the linked article, the structure imposed by slides is h…
Comment linking /FreeBooks/CollectiveNBlueBook/morphic.final.pdf
on ““One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech (2016)”http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
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on “By the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80”http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
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on “By the Bluebook implementation of Smalltalk-80”I used The Art of Prolog, Second Edition by Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-prolog-second-edition ), which is available for free using the "Open Access" link, and also Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson ( http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.... ), which is also available legally for free with permission (see…
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on “Between two Lisps”No, $199.95. You must be thinking of different software from a different vendor. Here's the "Smalltalk/V 286" Digitalk License Statement — http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial... And by 1991, with Smalltalk/V Windows and Smalltalk/V PM — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95." (Ad…
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on “Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)”Many of the early Smalltalk books, including the Blue Book which includes a description of Smalltalk written in Smalltalk, and the Green Book with essays on very early Smalltalk history, can be already downloaded from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
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on “C.S. on the cheap”> This is why the earliest social experiments in what we would now call “open source” – at SHARE and DECUS – were restricted to individual vendors’ product lines and (often) to individual machine types. Yes, because BASIC and Creative Computing magazine never happened. Conflating the idea of sharing code, with the idea of sharing system level code doesn't really help this essay IMNHO. As for the "creation myth" -- I…
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on “The myth of the fall”
