“Squeak is a modern, open source, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.”

Being a non-programmer, programming languages hold a peculiar fascination for me. (Natural languages too, for that matter.) I wouldn’t bring up a port of Squeak to the Nokia 770, however, if it weren’t for this announcement at the Institute for the Future of the Book about the forthcoming Sophie . . . hm-m, saying e-book creation tool is rather limited. Here’s IF’s description:

Sophie is an open-source platform for creating and reading electronic books for the networked environment. It will facilitate the construction of documents that use multimedia and time in ways that are currently difficult, if not impossible, with today’s software.

That’s definitely worth investigating, especially if one could create and read/experience Sophie books (for want of a better word; in fact, IF is resigned about finding a more appropriate word for objects that ultimately will resemble our notion of book not at all — but that’s not their problem).

I’ll be adding this to the Maemo Wiki application wishlist, but I thought I would put this out in a larger forum in hopes of catching the attention of a Squeak aficionado. Or someone who is as curious about languages as I am.

Edited later to add: Squeak’s already on the wish list. So I’m not the only one!

Edited even later to add: Squeak runs on Linux and I’m told that “where Squeak will run, Sophie will run.” Any idea whether Squeak is too big to fit on the 770 or whether it will run too slowly to be usable?

And anyone knowledgeable to assess the Linux community interest in Squeak and the potential of Sophie, especially for the educational market?