CampSmalltalk: Ralph Johnson

When I first learned Smalltalk, I was impressed not only by its power and elegance, but by its openness. I could figure out how anything worked, and I could change anything if I worked hard enough. I imagined that it would soon attract a community of people who would share code with each other. After all, Smalltalk code was easier to read and change than anything else I had seen, so it seemed a natural.

As we all know, this didn't really happen. Instead, the open source explosion happened in the Unix community, with C. This is partly because more people know C, and partly because the social conditions were ripe for an open source community. But we can create those social conditions, and Smalltalk provides a better technical base. I'm hoping that Camp Smalltalk will spark a revolution in the Smalltalk community that will allow us to grow the Smalltalk base like the C/Unix base has grown.

If you would like to be on the Camp Smalltalk mailing list, send me e-mail and tell me a little about yourself, i.e. why you want to be on it.

johnson@cs.uiuc.edu

st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/johnson

See my favorite comp.lang.smalltalk quote