Adele Goldberg

More on Smalltalk-80

Beginning

Smalltalk was the product of research led by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Alan Kay designed most of the early Smalltalk versions, Adele Goldberg wrote most of the documentation, and Dan Ingalls implemented most of the early versions. The first version, termed Smalltalk-71, was created by Kay in a few mornings on a bet that a programming language based on the idea of message passing inspired by Simula could be implemented in "a page of code". A later variant used for research work is now termed Smalltalk-72 and influenced the development of the Actor model. Its syntax and execution model were very different from modern Smalltalk variants.

Development

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language underpinning the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis". It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s. The language was first generally released as Smalltalk-80. Smalltalk-like languages are in active development and have gathered loyal communities of users around them. Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk. Smalltalk took second place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2017, but it was not among the 26 most loved programming languages of the 2018 survey.

Today

A significant development, that has spread across all Smalltalk environments as of 2016, is the increasing usage o f two web frameworks, Seaside and AIDA/Web, to simplify the building of complex web applications. Seaside has seen considerable market interest with Cincom, Gemstone, and Instantiations incorporating and extending it. The design of distributed Smalltalk influenced such systems as CORBA. It is still in active development today.

Life

Adele Goldberg was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1945 , and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She received her bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a master's degree in information science from the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in information science from the University of Chicago in 1973. She completed her dissertation, "Computer-Assisted Instruction: The Application of Theorem-proving to Adaptive Response Analysis," while working as a research associate at Stanford University. She also served as a visiting researcher at Stanford University.

Studies

She received her bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a master's degree in information science from the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in information science from the University of Chicago in 1973. She completed her dissertation, "Computer-Assisted Instruction: The Application of Theorem-proving to Adaptive Response Analysis," while working as a research associate at Stanford University. She also served as a visiting researcher at Stanford University.

Achievements

Along with Kay, she wrote the influential article "Personal Dynamic Media", which predicted a world where ordinary individuals would use notebook computers to exchange, modify, and redistribute personal media.[4] This paper outlined the vision for the Dynabook.

She was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from 1984 to 1986, and, together with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls, received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1987 and was also included in Forbes's "Twenty Who Matter".She also received PC Magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. In 1994, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

The Computer History Museum houses a collection of Goldberg's working documents, reports, publications and videotapes related to her work on the development of Smalltalk.