Cutting the Complexity: How Cincom Smalltalk Makes Things Easier for Users

In the “Pearls of Smalltalk,” Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, lists “simplicity” as an important descriptor of Cincom Smalltalk. How does Cincom Smalltalk make application development simple for our users?  It all starts with the language … Smalltalk.

If you look at both the creation and history of the language, Smalltalk was designed to be simple, consistent and efficient.

Veteran Smalltalkers know this story well, but when Alan Kay, the Father of Smalltalk, created the language, he did so on a dare. Early one morning at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Kay ran into two colleagues, Ted Kaehler and Dan Ingalls, and had a discussion about how a programming language would have to be large in order to have great power. Kay quickly asserted that he could define the most powerful computer language in the world in just a page of code. Kaehler and Ingalls told him to “put up or shut up.”

Kay “put up,” working from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. for eight straight days in response to this challenge he had received from his colleagues. Understanding that the hallmark of a great system is its simplicity, Kay set a goal to create a language that enabled the programmer to arrive at a simple result via a simple path, regardless of the complex operations taking place beneath the surface. He called it “hiding the details.” At the end of his eight-day marathon, he had completed the blueprint for his new programming language, which he called “Smalltalk.” Sure enough, all of the code for it fit on one page.

Simplicity is still one of the biggest benefits of Smalltalk and allows users to get more done with less, creates fewer problems for the user and less maintenance on the application. As Arden has quoted frequently, 

“Smalltalk allows users to get their arms around more complex problems.”