LittleSmalltalk

The mission of the LittleSmalltalk project!

Our Mission!

When I was a software interested teenager I read the book "A Little Smalltalk" by Timothy A. Budd and was fascinated by both the elegance and simplicity of the Smalltalk programming language and by the elegance and simplicity of the LittleSmalltalk system described in that book.

Later I became a professional software developer and worked with almost all recent programming languages. But I never lost my connection to Smalltalk. I used systems like Smalltalk/X and Visual Works for hobby projects and played around with Squeak.

But I missed something...

A Smalltalk that would be absolutely free (free as in beer and in speach) and that would use native widgets to draw GUIs. I don't like Squeak's appearance (wxSqueak didn't exist at that time and seems to be quite inactive these days) and I didn't believe that the self made widgets of Smalltalk/X are fine forever...

Then I tried to find other Smalltalk systems. I found some, like GNU Smalltalk. But they seem to focus on scripting and not on real Smalltalk environments and also don't use native widgets.

Hmmm... I also found LittleSmalltalk again and was happy to see that the system has been completely redeveloped since I read the book. But most links on the web were broken.

It was hard work to find all the LittleSmalltalk versions that Timothy A. Budd wrote. Once I had them and played around with all of them I decided to take version 4 and improve it. I wrote a GUI layer (based on IUP) and a database binding to SQLite3.

Later I lost my LittleSmalltalk archives and my backups and had to start again. Thanks to the people (especially Charles Childers) who provided some versions!

I asked Timothy if he would allow me to create a LittleSmalltalk project. One of the targets should be that LittleSmalltalk doesn't get lost in space. It should have a stable place on the web where people can find and download it. The project should also continue to develop the system. And so I was glad that Timothy allowed me to remove the license restrictions that he defined for version 4 of LittleSmalltalk and to replace them by whatever I like.

That's great! LittleSmalltalk is - and will continue to be - completely free!

The mission of the LittleSmalltalk project is to continue to develop LittleSmalltalk and turn it into something really usefull and to provide all the historical versions of the system.

LittleSmalltalk is the best stuff if you want to learn something about Smalltalk!

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