The Weekly Squeak

Randal L. Schwartz writes that:

“Dan Ingalls graciously granted me a 90-minute interview for my FLOSS “Weekly”
show.  We talked about the early days at Xerox PARC, the birth of Squeak,
and the Lively Kernel.”  

Dan Ingalls has been the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, as well as pop-up menus. He has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Scientist, and the ACM Software Systems Award.

Dan’s major contributions to the Squeak system include the original concept of a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator. He also designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He worked with John Maloney to produce much of Squeak’s Morphic and MVC frameworks, as well as its audio support. Dan is currently a member of the Squeak Board.

Dan is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he is working on the Lively kernel project, a new kernel for JavaScript that will offer the reflective capabilities needed for proper development support, as well as in-browser support for other high-level languages.

You can listen to the interview online or download it at http://twit.tv/floss29.

[Pop-Quiz: In which language is Dan more comfortable: C++ or Visual Basic?]