Smalltalk-80
by Adele Goldberg, David Robson · first published 1983
62% recommend38% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A holistic, well-written description of a complete programming environment, widely known as the Blue Book. It is accessible and offers a strong guide to understanding Smalltalk and its design.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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One of my all-time favorite programming books, about Smalltalk, is Smalltalk-80. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201113716/ That may be interest to those who want to investigate more.
on “Smalltalk and Pharo: Unknown rockstars” ↗Maybe start with "Smalltalk 80: The Language", and just read the first three chapters: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.... Also available for $1.89 (plus shipping) used from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-Language-Adele-Goldberg/d...
on “What Killed Smalltalk?” ↗…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…
on “Between two Lisps” ↗…people: - Structure and Interpretation of computer programs (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html) - Software Tools in Pascal by Kernighan and Plauger. - Programming Pearls by Bentley - Smalltalk 80: The Language and Its Implementation by Adele Goldberg. - Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Norvig - A Discipline of Programming by Dijkstra While I've ommited some important language…
on “Codeacademy for competent programmers?” ↗On the programming side: * Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie * Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec * Compilers (the Dragon Book) by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman * Smalltalk-80 (the Blue Book) by Goldberg and Robson But on the non-technical side, the book that probably had the biggest impact on my career was "What Color Is Your Parachute" by Richard Bolles. It is what convinced…
on “Ask HN: Books That Dramatically Transformed Your Programming Skills” ↗If you haven't yet, I'd recommend reading the "Blue Book" (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation) by Goldberg. It has a very holistic approach and, as such, is one of the most accessible and pleasant books describing a computing/programing environment one can…
on “Mezzano – An operating system written in Common Lisp” ↗If you haven't already, you should have a look at the free Pharo by Example book. http://www.pharobyexample.org/ The Blue Book (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson) is quite old but still one of the best book about Smalltalk. You can get it for free in PDF.
on “Squeak 4.0 released - now under MIT/Apache license - The H Open Source” ↗Pharo By Example was recently updated for Pharo 5: http://files.pharo.org/books/updated-pharo-by-example/ As for that list, Smalltalk-80: the Language and its Implementation (the "blue book") is phenomenal. One of the co-authors is Adele Goldberg herself, and the last few chapters (26-30) contain the blueprint for a basic, canonical VM…
on “Computer Programming Using GNU Smalltalk (2009)” ↗…development of Squeak. Lots of free books courtesy of Stéphane Ducasse and the people who released them for free and OCR'd them: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/. I'm reading The Bluebook, Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Goldberg and Robson, presently. And if you either don't want to install Smalltalk on your system or want to use an older version: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/.…
on “The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)” ↗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…
on “Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi” ↗…had been assigned by a software error. Amazon was most apologetic for their inability to ship the item, and compensated me with a $10.00 voucher. On a related note, I found a copy of Adele Goldberg's 'Smalltalk 80: The Language' in a junk shop for 50 cents. When I checked Amazon, the listed price was over five thousand dollars (due to automated bidding bots from rival booksellers).
on “Learn C and build your own Lisp” ↗I'm not sure whether or not GNU Smalltalk is a modern version: gnu Smalltalk is an implementation that closely follows the Smalltalk-80 language as described in the book Smalltalk-80: the Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson, which will hereinafter be referred to as the Blue Book. -- https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/gst.html…
on “Computer Programming Using GNU Smalltalk (2009)” ↗Goldberg (1984) Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProg... Goldberg & Robson (1983) Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementataion http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
on “Smalltalk-78 Xerox NoteTaker in-browser emulator” ↗