Smalljs: Smalltalk-80 That Compiles to Javascript

From https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998...

    Ralph -
    
    Many times I have browsed past your article "About the Smalltalk
    Balloon" and been tempted to add to the little bit of history that you
    have there.  While your link is entitled "Why a hot-air balloon is the
    symbol of Smalltalk," you never really answer the question.  The time
    has come to tie up that loose end.  Return with us now to those
    thrilling days of yesteryear, and
    
     The Real Story About the Smalltalk Balloon
    
    Everyone in our group wanted to challenge the ivory tower image in
    Byte's special issue on Pascal, because in fact we were all working
    intensely to get Smalltalk-80 out the door from Xerox at the time.
    The cover of that issue depicted the "land of Smalltalk" as a remote
    island, and that triggered a connection for me out of which was born
    the fanstasy of liberating Smalltalk from the ivory tower by balloon
    ascent.
    
    Here is the connection...
    
    My favorite book from youth was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne.
    It is the story of an engineer, Cyrus Harding, who gets blown far
    afield in a storm during a balloon surveillance mission in the 1860's.
    He ends up stranded on an island but, through ingenuity and a bit of
    luck, he manages to recreate most of the accomplishments and comforts
    of civilization on his own (with a little help from an amiable
    orangutan ;-).  Cyrus Harding became my childhood standard for
    resourcefulness and the conviction that anything can be accomplished
    if you are clever and persistent.
    
    The fantasy of a balloon as the vehicle for Smalltalk's release stuck
    with me from then on.  When the opportunity came to design the cover
    for the Byte issue on Smalltalk, I made the suggestion of the balloon
    lifting off from the island shown on the Pascal cover, and everyone
    picked up on it.  Robert Tinney executed the wonderful graphic that we
    know so well, and the rest is history.
    
     - Dan
    
    P.S.  There is a further coincidence in this particular literary
    allusion: It is revealed at the end of The Mysterious Island that the
    island is actually the base of operations for a more well-known Verne
    character, and that character happens also to be the childhood hero of
    a more well-known figure in the history of Smalltalk.

In Pharo your entire project along with its runtime, code, data and IDE is one long lived intertwined and dispersed state. I was never really sure if this is necessarily a problem or not.

But today I had an interesting idea. Pharo is Factorio of programming. You are evolving living, functioning system using itself. And we know most of Factorio games end up as ad-hoc tangled mess, where new things are added rather on the side than old things being properly refactored. So if your Factorio factories are always pristine examples of order you should be fine with Pharo. If not, you might be better off with something like PHP or Fermyon Spin which have app state living no longer than a single request-response. With long lived state neatly and separately held in the database and source files.

Nowadays that experience is only visible in LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

[0] - https://interlisp.org/