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IBM Programming IT Technology

Visual Age for Smalltalk For Non-Comm Use 54

Posted by Hemos from the you-can-get-it-if-you-want-to dept.
paugq writes " IBM has released Visual Age 6.01 for Smalltalk for free for non-commercial use. You can download it here, it's available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc (registration needed). Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC during the 1970s"
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Visual Age for Smalltalk For Non-Comm Use More

Visual Age for Smalltalk For Non-Comm Use

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  • Visual Age Smalltalk (Score:5, Informative)

    by kzadot ( 249737 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @09:51AM (#6722455)
    This is great news, smalltalk is one of the original "pure" OO languages. The OO extensions in Objective C are based on smalltalk.

    For those of you who have up until now been using Squeak, may be interested in upgrading to a more serious tool, now that its available.

    More info here. [ibm.com] Sorry, couldnt find any screenshots.

    • The screenshots are in the documentation [ibm.com],
      for example the Getting Started Guide [ibm.com] (PDF 634Kb).

    • I've been using Squeak for a number of projects and general areas for 4-5 years now. For me, Squeak is many things- it's my scripting language, my prototyping language, my implementation language (occasionally with a C library when I need the speed), my desktop environment for both my desktop and my PDA. VAST would have a hard time filling all of these needs.

      I've used VAST before, and don't get me wrong, it's a really nice product- a rock solid Smalltalk that does a good job fitting in with apps written
    • Its not "one of the original pure OO languages", its THE original OO language. OO as a concept was demonstrated by making smalltalk.
      • Its not "one of the original pure OO languages", its THE original OO language. OO as a concept was demonstrated by making smalltalk.

        The creators of Simula 67 [ifi.uio.no] would disagree. Simula was the first object-oriented language.

        Not that it really matters who came first. Smalltalk is still around, while Simula is simply a relic [1].

        For another interesting flamewar/discussion, ask a Common Lisp bigot and an Ada fanatic which language was the first standardized language - they will fight it out to the death. (F
    • In my opinion Visual Age Smalltalk is great environment. I use it everyday from 4 years.
      If someone is interested in more info about Smalltalk as a language my personal favorite top 3 sites are:
      www.whysmalltalk.com
      www.goodstart.com
      www .smalltalk.org
  • There are two major open source implementations of Smalltalk commonly available today: GNU/Smalltalk [gnu.org] and Squeak [squeak.org]. GNU/Smalltalk is more server-oriented, and does not support Smalltalk's traditional MVC GUI, espousing a new system based off Tk. It is fairly fast, and somewhat lighter weight than Squeak, making it a better choice for headless applications like application servers. Squeak is, at the moment, mind-blowingly huge, but it provides both the venerable MVC GUI and Morphic, which is derived from Sun Microsystems' Self programming language. It also has been ported to many non-Unix platforms, like Win32, WinCe, MacOS 9, etc.

    • Squeak is, at the moment, mind-blowingly huge, [...]

      That's a bit of an exaggeration -- the uncompressed image, sources, and changes file come to about 30MB, and the vm weighs in at under 1MB on my FreeBSD box. It still defaults to about 48MB RAM for the default heap size. That's still way less than, say, the 1.4.1 JDK (which is over 40MB in size, compressed).

      I don't know about VAST, but Cincom's Linux VisualWorks used to work fine on FreeBSD (possibly also NetBSD).

      • I suppose it would come as no surprise that I also consider the JDK to be a colossus, as well. Squeak, compared to other production Smalltalk environments, is a veritable juggernaut, coming with a large array of semi-complete applications built into the default image, including a 3D animation tool, a web browser, email client, irc client, midi player, unused truetype font support, two separate GUI's and heaven knows what else.

        I find Squeak interesting, but for serious tasks, its overfeatured standard imag

  • Cincom has had a non commercial version for years (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @11:08AM (#6723065)
    http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com has had thier non commercial for years.

  • Who says this is free for non-commercial use? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JLyle ( 267134 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @11:14AM (#6723136) Homepage
    IBM has released Visual Age 6.01 for Smalltalk for free for non-commercial use...
    I don't doubt your word, but I am having trouble finding any evidence to support the claim that this is "free for non-commercial use". I started at the home page [ibm.com] for Visual Age for Smalltalk, and clicked through a few of the links from that page, but didn't find anything to suggest that it's free. I also subscribed to the comp.lang.smalltalk and ibm.software.vasmalltalk newsgroups and scanned the posts there for the last few months but didn't see any announcements along these lines.

    So before I go through the hassle of signing up for an "account" with IBM, and then downloading and installing the software, could someone please provide a pointer to the information about how it's licensed for non-commercial use?
    • Non-commercial use = an evaluation that never expires. You can use it for personal projects and the like, but you can't make any money off of it. You can't use it to write a web app that generates profit. However, you can download it, play around, write some code, and file out the code to share with others.

      • However, you can download it, play around, write some code, and file out the code to share with others.

        Thanks very much, Aaron. But to follow up on my response to SeaGK, does their license explicitly give permission for me to "share with others" the non-commercial software that I develop using VAST?

        I'm not trying to pick nits here. I would guess that once you've exported the code from VAST into some "shareable" source code format, that there are no obvious signs that the code was generated with VAST (as

    • Re:Who says this is free for non-commercial use? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SeaGK ( 620387 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @12:04PM (#6723618)
      From the License:

      You may 1) use the Program only for internal evaluation or testing purposes (emphasis mine) and 2) make and install a reasonable number of copies of the Program in support of such use, unless IBM identifies a specific number of copies in the documentation accompanying the Program. The terms of this license apply to each copy you make.

      so, No, it is not FREE it is only gratis (no money) for testing.
      You should give it a try though, .... i tried version 1.0 long time ago and it was a very nice IDE.
      • Thanks very much for the clarification, SeaGK. I couldn't even find a copy of the license online so this helps a lot.

        As you already noted, however, I think it's important to distinguish between "free for non-commercial use" and an unlimited evaluation copy. I don't know a lot about Smalltalk in the first place, especially the mechanics of how one distributes Smalltalk programs to other users. Having said that, it doesn't sound like their license explicitly permits me to develop free (non-commercial) softwa

  • Other Smalltalk's available for *nix (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord of the Fries ( 132154 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @11:15AM (#6723143) Homepage
    There are other Smalltalk flavors available for *nix platforms as well.


    I've used 'em all, each has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on what you're trying to do. They're all Smalltalk though, and that makes 'em great!
  • I have heard about smalltalk since the early 80s. It was supposed to be the next "big" thing. It never really took off I feel beacuse of the lack of a good cheap dev system. It would be fun to learn it now.

    • Re:This is good news. (Score:3, Informative)

      by RevAaron ( 125240 )
      As others have mentioned, check out Squeak Smalltalk. [squeak.org] Squeak doesn't have the same goals as a product like VAST or VisualWorks, but it is a free Smalltalk with a very active user community, and is open source- it's Free, of course. :) It's been available since 1996, and is always moving forward. Check it out!

  • Umm, this isn't anything new... (Score:4, Informative)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `noraaver'> on Monday August 18, 2003 @11:58AM (#6723552) Homepage
    While I'm very happy to see Slashdot giving my favorite language a little publicity, I can't see what is new about this.

    I thought perhaps this was something new from IBM- a new package or a new license for a non-commercial version of VAST. Perhaps that is there long term intent, but I just downloaded and installed it, and lo and behold the start-up splash screen informs me that this is an evaluation version. IBM has had evaluation versions available for download from their site (or a CD from IBM, free) for a long time. Looks like the same license and the same stuff.

    That said, I hope it doesn't discourage anyone frmo trying it out- or possible trying out a free Smalltalk like Squeak. [squeak.org] :)
    • The previous download was time limited which for me was annoying because I need more than 45 days to play with and learn the tool.

      It's likely that I can't afford a personal copy of VAST but it will be really fun to have to play with and compare with other Smalltalk env's.
      • Ah- so there is something new! Thanks for sharing. I agree, 30-60 days isn't usually enough for me either... It might be if I were getting paid to sit down with the product and evaluate it, but on my own time I need a bit more than that...

  • The Spirit of Smalltalk (Score:5, Informative)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `noraaver'> on Monday August 18, 2003 @12:43PM (#6724098) Homepage
    The Smalltalk philosophy and community is an interesting beast. Smalltalk has been about being open since before the copyleft, before the FSF or GNU- right about the time RMS was first being hired at the MIT AI lab.

    Unlike most of the rest of the software world, Smalltalk is open to its core. I think of it as sort of psycholinguists for programming languages. Due to way Smalltalk works, the community grew into a culture of openness that C/C++ programmers don't know, even with licenses like the GPL.

    You see, in a Smalltalk environment, the entire system is available to you, at your fingertips. It's all there, and it's all in Smalltalk. If I want to change the way the plus (+) operator works, I can. Since everything is an object in Smalltalk, and every operation a method, it's just a matter of having a look at the + method on the class Number. In Smalltalk, we notate that as Number>>#+. Which incidentally is also legitamate code- it returns a CompiledMethod object, which contains the compiled bytecode for that method. Or, if I wanted to change the way the Smalltalk system managed windows, I could just pop into the Window class. Nothing is hidden, nothing is kept from you, the developer/user- even on "proprietary" and commercial Smalltalks like VisualAge for Smalltalk and VisualWorks. The ability to change the way anything works, getting the source code for everything is something you don't get with most industrial-strength commercial systems. Definately cool, IMHO.

    One exception is the virtual machine, which is often written in C and makes up a pretty small percentage of the Smalltalk system. Java tends to have a lot of what we think of as the "java system" in the VM or a VM extension, but most Smalltalk VMs are small.

    Squeak [squeak.org] takes this to the next level- Squeak's VM is written in Smalltalk, and then translated to C, and them compiled by gcc, etc. You can make modifications to the way you want your virtual machine to work, and the Squeak system manages the translation to C and compiling it to something your computer can understand.

    • Re:The Spirit of Smalltalk (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:23PM (#6725897)

      You see, in a Smalltalk environment, the entire system is available to you, at your fingertips.

      The same is true of Lisp. I can look at the function slot of the + symbol to get the function. It's a compiled function object. I can use that object opaquely, or if I want to analyze it, I can call function-lambda-expression to recover the source (if it was compiled with debug info), or disassemble to get the assembly code.

      The whole system is out there, in the open. I can change it, I can query it.

      One company that made their living on Lisp was called Symbolics. They made Lisp Machines, aka lispms. These were specialized hardware platforms with processors designed to run Lisp very efficiently. Also, they came with an OS called Genera. Genera was a programmer's dream OS. I won't try to describe it here, because I couldn't do it justice; I'll just say that I started using Squeak because it reminded me of Genera.

      Now, lispms were all about the openness. You could play with the smallest internal function you wanted to. They also came with almost all the source (I think missing just part of the boot loader). But that openness was bordered by your license agreement; you still couldn't share it with your neighbor.

      Symbolics wasn't the first to make lispms. They started at the MIT AI lab. This was about the time that parts of the computer industry discovered that Lisp was a good thing. There was a sudden explosion of Lisp in the industry (much like the .com boom). Some of the lab hackers, led by Richard Greenblatt, formed a hacking company called Lisp Machines Incorporated, or LMI. This company was set up to support hackers, rather than maximize profits. (For this reason, they didn't take outside investors.)

      While the company wasn't profit-driven, nobody wanted it to piledrive into the ground. So Greenblatt called in Russell Noftsker, who had more business sense. Nofstker promptly took Greenblatt's ideas and started his own company, Symbolics. The two were instantly bitter rivals.

      Everybody at the AI lab was associated with one of the two companies, except for RMS. (Symbolics was entirely proprietary, and LMI-- while they wanted an open OS-- was fine with proprietary apps. RMS wouldn't camp with either of them.) LMI wanted hackers to work part-time at the lab, and part-time for LMI. The point of LMI was to support the lab hackers, and the culture. But Symbolics was about making money, and didn't care about the culture. They hired away all the hackers they could. Symbolics also leveled accusations about conflict of interest, and made all the LMI hackers leave the lab.

      Almost overnight, the AI lab had been decimated. There's more to this story, but I think you get the idea. The once-open lab culture had been destroyed by ideas of proprietary business.

      RMS was very sad to see this happen. He was the only hacker who hadn't left for LMI or Symbolics. This is why he started GNU: he wanted to recreate the culture of openness and freedom that he had known before.

      I do believe that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies to programming languages; the design of the languages a programmer knows will strongly influence how he thinks about problems. But this story is a counterexample to the idea that openness in a language design engenders openness in other areas.

      • Indeed, openness in a language or its community doesn't prevent things like this from happening. However, it also does not mean that Lisp's openness didn't encourage openness in other areas as well. It simply proves that money is a strong motivator for humans in our culture, which is something proved over and over again. An open system like Lisp doesn't pay the bills inherently, and these people likely saw a chance to share with the world something they loved dearly.

  • Bah... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by snake_dad ( 311844 )
    Bah, no UnixWare version :/

  • Problems with Smalltalks... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by teambpsi ( 307527 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @05:21PM (#6727152) Homepage
    First off, I need to state that I'm a HUGE smalltalk fan/user/zealot....but....

    Its a 'monolithic kernel' architecture.

    There is of course the "stripping" process to pare down the image size, but frankly it still comes out pretty large

    Of course, with the price of memory these days, its not so much of a concern anymore ;)

    Seriously though, there was at one point some discussion of an embedded 'cpu', much like the BasicStamp system that would allow smalltalk on 'anything', not sure if it went anywhere

    The other problem is one of Education! Very few (and i haven't checked recently) schools offer any educational courses that focus, let along USE Smalltalk.

    Text books frequently use banking examples to attempt to show the advantages of using pure objects -- unfortunately banking requires near real-time performance, and traditionally most interpreted systems do not perform. Of course we have bigger badder processors to make up for that ;)

    Also, the track-record for large-scale systems hasn't been what i'd call complimentary: Having spent some time working on "!ntegrator" for QWEST (then USWEST), I can tell you that the approach taken was next to dismal in terms of results after three years. Much of which is or has been replaced with either Web-based systems or J2EE.

    Objective-C is a great migration/hybrid -- NeXT, and now hopefully Apple will show that.

    Now, to its credit, and not to denigrate it any, I kind of see Smalltalk as a "LOGO for Adults" -- seems to be a good sort of tool for instruction.

    Its safe to play (sandbox), responsive, and teaches some very important principals (like THINKING before you code ;)
    • >>There is of course the "stripping" process to pare down the image size, but frankly it still comes out pretty large

      Stripping isn't the only way to package in Smalltalk. ;-) I build Liberty BASIC in Smalltalk by starting with a minimal image and adding my classes to it. Then I save the image. This is just the opposite of what you describe, and is not hard to do. The final application object image is only a little more than a megabyte.

      -Carl Gundel, author of Liberty BASIC
      http://www.libertybasic.

  • Visual Age (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jefu ( 53450 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @11:31AM (#6734271) Homepage Journal
    I've used the Visual Age for Java environment and found it very nice indeed. It was rather a memory hog and startup was slow (glacial may be more accurate), but once started it worked very well indeed and was by far the most impressive IDE type environment I've ever used.

    I wish they'd made it open source and released it - I think it would be quite a bit nicer even now with a bunch of people poking at it.

    • Funny that you'd mention that, as Eclipse [eclipse.org] -- also by IBM. Is basically an open-source rewritten-from-scratch (in Java) version of the VisualAge for Java IDE. Take a look. I've been using it for developing for over a year while my co-workers toiled away at JBuilder. Luckily for them they have IntelliJ now which is better but still, they can't go around and change stuff about it they don't like -- tough for them... heh
    • It may be of interest to know that for a long time Visual Age for Java was itself written in Smalltalk. I think that may have changed by the very last versions, but certainly the earlier ones were.
  • I never realized that "real" applications were written in smalltalk until I noticed that one of the alert boxes from one of the programs we use at work had "visualage smalltalk" in the title bar.

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