you can see for yourself, e.g. by looking at the Smalltalk emulators that run in the browser, reading Smalltalk books, etc.
I think it's the "blue book" that was used by the Smalltalk group to revive Smalltalk-80 in the form of Squeak. it's well-documented for instance in the "back to the future" paper. I haven't had the fortune of studying Squeak or other Smalltalks in depth but it seems fairly clear to me that there are very powerful ideas being expressed very concisely in these systems. likewise with VPRI/STEPS.
so although it might be somewhat comparing apples to oranges, I do think when, e.g., Alan Kay mentions in a talk that his group built a full personal computing system (operating system, "apps", etc) in ~20kLOC (iirc, but it's the same order of magnitude anyway), that it is important to take this seriously and consider the implications.
similar when one considers Sutherland's Sketchpad, Engelbart's mother of all demos, Hypercard, etc. and contrasts with (pardon my French) the absolute trash that is most of what we use today (web browsers - not to knock the people who work on them, some of whom are clearly extremely capable and intelligent - generally no WYSIWYG, text and parsing all over the place, etc etc)
like, I just saw a serious rendering glitch just now while typing this, where some text that came first was being displayed after text that came later, which made me go back and erase text just to realize the text was fine, type it again, and see the same glitch again. that to me seems completely insane. how is there such a rendering error in a textbox in 2025 on an extremely simple website?
and this all points to a great deal of things that Alan Kay points out. some of his quips: "point if view is worth 80 IQ points", "stop reinventing the flat tire", and "most ideas are mediocre down to bad".
guess I misunderstood your question, and also went on a bit of a rant.
morphle said "you can write a complete operating system and all the functionality of the mayor apps (word processing, graphics, spreadsheets, social media, WYSIWYG, browsers) and the hardware it runs on in less than 20000 lines of (high level language) code. They achieved it a few times before in 10000 lines (Smalltalk-80 and earlier versions), a little over 20000 (Frank) and 300000 lines (Squeak/Etoys/Croquet) and a few programmers in a few years."
to which you replied "did they?"
to which I replied something along the lines of "you can take a look at Smalltalk systems" to answer your question. to clarify, I meant you can look at what the extent of what they were capable of is, and look at their code. which, again, to me is a bit apples to oranges, but is nonetheless something that ought not to be dismissed.
I think it's the "blue book" that was used by the Smalltalk group to revive Smalltalk-80 in the form of Squeak. it's well-documented for instance in the "back to the future" paper. I haven't had the fortune of studying Squeak or other Smalltalks in depth but it seems fairly clear to me that there are very powerful ideas being expressed very concisely in these systems. likewise with VPRI/STEPS.
so although it might be somewhat comparing apples to oranges, I do think when, e.g., Alan Kay mentions in a talk that his group built a full personal computing system (operating system, "apps", etc) in ~20kLOC (iirc, but it's the same order of magnitude anyway), that it is important to take this seriously and consider the implications.
similar when one considers Sutherland's Sketchpad, Engelbart's mother of all demos, Hypercard, etc. and contrasts with (pardon my French) the absolute trash that is most of what we use today (web browsers - not to knock the people who work on them, some of whom are clearly extremely capable and intelligent - generally no WYSIWYG, text and parsing all over the place, etc etc)
like, I just saw a serious rendering glitch just now while typing this, where some text that came first was being displayed after text that came later, which made me go back and erase text just to realize the text was fine, type it again, and see the same glitch again. that to me seems completely insane. how is there such a rendering error in a textbox in 2025 on an extremely simple website?
and this all points to a great deal of things that Alan Kay points out. some of his quips: "point if view is worth 80 IQ points", "stop reinventing the flat tire", and "most ideas are mediocre down to bad".