Small Talk

Small Talk "eyecon" is always watching you.

“In Soviet Russia,small talk, talks about you”

~ Russian reversal on small talk

“I love Small Talk stuff”

~ Alan Kay

Small Talk (ST) is a language using small words and stuff. This language is the most unusual OO (Obliquely Opaque) language ever made. ST is still in circulation, with only 3 primary users; the creator, and two anonymous Muslims. ST was destined to be the greatest language on the planet, however, the binary code language was infinitely more useful. To date, ST has only one main advantage over any other mainstream programming language, only 3 people know it.

Small Talk Missile Crisis

The 80's brought the earth a new disturbance in the force. During 1982, a new crisis, now known as the Small Talk Missile Crisis, occurred. On Christmas Eve, 10 Cuban commandoes attacked a farm house in Alaska. During the raid, the commandoes had planted potatoes, cigars, and missiles in the soil. Using high-tech 1337 hacking skillz, the villians encripted their location with a captured German Enigma machine. Without a means to find the degenerate invaders, the USA, Canada, and Congo established the Useless Maker League (UML). UML was set out to make totally obsolete language that were capable of confusing the Cubans until they left. The only other language UML made was Ruby. The Small Talk Missile crisis was never resolved, and somewhere in Alaska is a bunch of missiles, cigars, potatoes, and Cubans.

Development

Small Talk:Version Victorian

UML's goals were quite complicated. They didn't know what they wanted, nor did they care. They received all necessary funding and resources, but they were lazy. The languages being manufactured were amazing and made perfect sense. Their first product was C++, but was later discarded, as it was too perfect. Firing their old Commander in Chief, Alan Kay, They hired a new team of specialists, including the OO guru, . Under his command, the staff were soon chanting "Unary, Binary, Keyword", until they came up with Small Talk. It is because of this, that ST is executed in the order unary, binary, keyword. Up until now, no new releases of ST have surfaced, most likely because the creators are still looking in Alaska for commandoes. To keep the rest of the UML team working, ST had another unique feature. While the creators were away from the main office, they utilized a giant eye icon to watch the office. This "eyecon" greatly demoralized the other co-workers so much and over 90% of them jumped out of the 13th floor window. The combination of a poor language, degenerate implementation, and tight monitoring led the other 10% of the crew insane.

Style of Language

As mentioned before, ST is a purely OO language. Being Obliquely-Opaque, the language is so confusing, only the creators write code. Everyone else just nods their head until one of the three people who know ST can help them. The code is separated into many sections.

Class

Something entirely unknown, and unique to all OO languages. The inventors conceived the concept of having all code thrown into "blocks" called classes to avoid other programmers from reading their code. Classes must have a minimum of one million lines and a maximum of one million and one, although the Doctor frowns on large classes with the extra "one". Classes contain desks, white boards, chairs, chalkboards, markers, books, and of course slaves. A class must start with the keyword, "Extra-lopple-Kettle", and must end with, "eltteK-elppol-artxE". Classes may NOT contain any variables, methods, or numeric values. all such code must be put into other sections of code.

Methods

Small Talk user frustrated, taking revenge on the "eyecon".

Where most useful code goes. "useful" refers to the program doing anything, rather than something. Methods may not contain any text, relying only on number values. The methods may not communicate with the classes. They may only communicate to junk methods.

Junk Methods

A method type that is full of garbage numbers, like 3, 8, and 15. They may also be filled with Classes, but may not communicate with them. The junk methods are quarantined from the rest of the code, and may not be visible while the programmer is watching the screen. This idea gave birth to the ghost "Boo" in Mario.

Instance Methods/Variables

Instance methods and variables are one-and-the-same, and refers to on-demand local cheese values. Useless in normal coding, but is almost always present in the code to discourage copying. During the ST Missile Crisis, instance methods made up 600,000 lines of the code. The other 400,000 lines were junk methods.

Private Reception

To the twenty or so people that actually heard of Small Talk, around 2 people like it. One of the co-founders was reported saying "It started off as Pac-Man, but i forgot the blue ghost's name". Although no one knows what he meant by this statement, one may deduce this co-founder went insane. To this day, only the OO guru himself understands ST, and is the most skilled in programming, partly because he changes the language when someone else masters it.

Public Reception

Released by IBM software on 1983. The package included Small Talk 1.0, a leg warmer, and a small hammer to break the computer if need be. The pack cost $20, and was also sold in another bundle with Atari Jaguar for $22. Only 1 person bought the commercial software package. His name is held anonymous, but resides in . No one else likes Small Talk. Even Jesus cries when he needs to program in ST.

Jesus trying to teach someone Small Talk.

Other Uses

None.

Controversy

Many have argued that Small Talk is not a programming language. By "Many" this article refers to the 20 or so people who know about Small Talk. The reasons for this claims are a prgramming language needs:

• a purpose
• more than 50 people who know it
• to be useful
• to run on normal computers
• technical support

Because of the lack of these criteria, one can only assume that ST is the worst language ever, if in fact, it is a language.

Updates

ST has not been updated since 1986. When most of the designers went to Alaska, they never returned. IBM thought it was a joke, so they pulled the product off the shelf.

Legacy and "Return?"

ST has influenced OO designing around the world. That is why no one else uses OO languages. Experience has shown that ST had taken too long to perform any task, had horrible complicated code, and hi-jacked the user's computer to perform Go-Bus schedule gathering. Rumours surrounding have surfaced claiming a Small Talk comeback. No jokes. True (??????) story. Small Talk 1.000000000001 is stating to increase the productivity of the language by 2%. The new functions heard to be added were:

• pointers - so people could point at stuff
• lists - so people could list stuff
• linked lists so people could connect their newly created lists
• separate classes - so classes didn't need to be 1,000,000 lines long
• new "eyecon" featuring mascara on eylashes
• technical support from the OO guru himself
• Vim style unix GUI interface
• function to calculate the square root of an integral
• new garbage collection handler
• can divide by Zero

This product is expected to be released late 2012, for a bargain price of $25 for PC and $2000 for Mac.