Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 released after 4+ years of development
Open-source programming language and environment ships major update with new tree browser, Objectland examples, and system-wide improvements.
Conversation activity · last 37 hours peak 6/hr
Summary, timeline and people extracted by Claude from 19 items across 5 sources · 11h ago. Quotes are verbatim.
Squeak 6.1, an open-source Smalltalk implementation, was released on August 10, 2026, following more than four years of community development. The release introduces a new tree browser for class navigation, Objectland (which revives and extends examples from Squeak 3), and numerous enhancements to programming tools, the Morphic UI framework, and overall system performance.
- Squeak 6.1 released after 4+ years of community development with new tree browser and Objectland interactive examples.
- Major improvements across programming tools, Morphic UI framework, and system-wide performance.
- Release gained significant traction on Hacker News (274 points, 134 comments) and spread across tech community platforms.
How it unfolded
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Release noted on Lobsters, another technology community platform, indicating broader awareness in developer communities.
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Squeak's official Mastodon account announces the release and details major new capabilities: a tree browser for class navigation and organization, Objectland for interactive examples, plus improvements to programming tools and the Morphic UI framework.
“After more than 4 years of work, our community has put together a big bouquet of new capabilities and improvements”
squeak@fosstodon.org · Mastodon ↗ -
Event Squeak 6.1 released
Squeak 6.1 officially released after more than 4 years of development by the community.
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Reaction Community discussion on Hacker News
Post reaches 274 points on Hacker News with 134 comments, generating significant technical discussion.
What people are saying verbatim
“After more than 4 years of work, our community has put together a big bouquet of new capabilities and improvements”
squeak@fosstodon.org, Official Squeak account · Mastodon ↗ · Aug 10, 8:44 AM
“A new tree browser for navigating and organizing classes - Objectland, bringing back and extending the colorful world of examples from Squeak 3 - Plenty of new features, bugfixes, and speed-ups”
squeak@fosstodon.org, Official Squeak account · Mastodon ↗ · Aug 10, 8:44 AM
Voices from the web unedited
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Squeak 6.1 just got released! After more than 4 years of work, our community has put together a big bouquet of new capabilities and improvements: - A new tree browser for navigating and organizing classes - Objectland, bringing back and extending the colorful world of examples from Squeak 3 - Plenty of new features, bugfixes, and speed-ups for…
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And some months ago I was flirting with the idea of "Smalltalk and Erlang had a baby" and have Smalltalk syntax to an actor environment ran by a Erlang VM style. Plus some insanely cool ideas about a causal debugger for distributed bugs.The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the…
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Just like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what "object oriented" actually means.I haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum.Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts…
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one thing I love about Smalltalk is being able to inspect the code as it's running. Especially from the GUI. You can just be like Oh I wonder where the code for this button is from, inspect it, and it takes you right to the code. It's a shame we can't have this level of introspection without negative performance implications.
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Congrats to the Squeak 6.1 team! I was an early contributor to Squeak from when Alan Kay's group was at Apple (I see that SameGame, the first game implemented in Morphic is still in the image), and still enjoy following the progress of Squeak and all of its spinoffs.
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Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten.All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.
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What are the best books/papers/blog posts to learn about Morphic's architecture? I'm not a user of any Smalltalk implementation but I'd like to learn more as the Smalltalk approach to UI is very interesting.
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> almost all of Javascript's good parts come from SmalltalkIs this underselling the role of Self in JS’s prototype-based object system, or saying that a prototype-based object system is not one of the good parts?
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For me, Smalltalk's "wow" moment was the concept of a persistently running image, with the developer's job being to mould and manipulate it into the shape s/he wants.
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Can someone give me some advice on what to use as a beginner? Pharo? Squeak? Common Lisp?I just want to understand how this whole thing works and see how I can use it.