The Weekly Squeak

Howdy!

If you want to know some cool history of Smalltalk, and perhaps this is a strong argument in actually *being* a Smalltalk and not trying to distance yourself from that rich and lovely heritage…. anyway, here goes:

On 04/28/2014 08:14 PM, Alain Busser wrote:

> Also, Ruby is famous for these methods:

> 

> *select

> *reject

> *collect

> 

> do these names not remind you something 😉 ?

There is a funny story about these verbs. Martin McClure told me at ESUG in Brest to ask Dan Ingalls about it, hinting that they are “inspired”

by a famous song.

And thus I did ask Dan in my interview with him I did a few years back over Skype (it is an interesting interview, for example – was there an inspiration from biology when Smalltalk was created?):

http://files.krampe.se/interview.mp3

…the song in question is by Arlo Guthrie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant_Massacree

…and here is a URL to the lyrics of it:

http://www.lyricsty.com/arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-lyrics.html

(search down to “injected”!) …or just let me quote:

“They got a building down New York City, it’s called Whitehall Street, Where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, Neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one Day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning.”

…now… where do we stuff in #neglect:? 🙂

regards, Göran