Hacker News

67 points by theanonymousone 4 days ago | 11 comments

Same VM as Squeak and Pharo so just as fast but a bit lacking in libs but this is an opportunity to contribute to open source for me.

Currently using it to build a mostly static website (with Pocketbase & lighttpd). A good experience all round.

ajasmin 3 hours ago

I haven't used these in a long while.

Is this a fork? What's Cuis' main selling point compared Squeak and Pharo?

edfsadfer 3 hours ago

Cuis is an environment derived from Squeak as I understand it with all the "clutter" removed. So it is really a cut-down Squeak. Just as Pharo was a cut-down Squeak originally.

For me it was easier and quicker to get something done in Cuis than in any other Smalltalk (Squeak, Pharo, VA, Dolphin).

dialogbox 3 hours ago

It looks like it is a fork started quite a long time ago.

https://cuis.st/documentation/explanation/history

isr 3 hours ago

The history link gives details, but if you want a quick analogy:

Pharo & Cuis both forked from squeak at roughly the same time

Squeak = Debian

Pharo = Arch

Cuis = Alpine

Cuis has rigorously simplified, so its much easier to explore & understand the system - because there's less of it

Cuis's re-engineering of morphic is really quite brilliant. Everything is hardware accelerated vector graphics. EVEN THE FONTS are drawn that way. And they remain crisp even when zoomed (in or out) & rotated.

Pharo does have some cool stuff though. I'd love to see fuel (object serialization) & soil (a fully oo database) ported to cuis. And the big one - seaside

But its not an either-or situation. 99% 9f what you learn & do in one is applicable to the other. But if you're starting out, I would definitely recommend cuis (not implying that you wouldn't necessarily stick with it)

ssivark 2 hours ago

Is the development experience compatible with modern AI-assisted workflows? Coding agents have drastically reduced the entry barrier for playing with software projects, and I can think of some fun ideas for Smalltalk things I've been curious about.

ofrzeta 42 minutes ago

Totally non-functional argument but the website looks really nice and makes you wanna try it.

chasil 3 hours ago

What most people do not know is that Smalltalk was originally a childrens' teaching language, a peer of Logo, which (I have learned in previous comments) preceded it.

"Smalltalk is a purely object-oriented programming language that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

0xpgm 7 minutes ago

Also, even though it called itself purely object-oriented, the earlier versions lacked inheritance.

Nowadays object oriented programming is almost entirely associated with inheritance hierarchies.

Perhaps inheritance isn't as central to object oriented programming as initially envisioned.

yje07039 3 hours ago

I hadn’t heard anything about Smalltalk since seeing it used in version 1.4 of Scratch, so it’s a pleasant surprise to come across it again after all this time.

sroerick 4 hours ago

This looks cool and beautiful! Ive looked at other Smalltalks and been pretty intimidated. This feels cool and welcoming.