The book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition" written by David LeBlanc and Michael Howard, published by Microsoft Press in 2002, was once required reading at Microsoft, following Bill Gates' "Trustworthy Computing" memo. The fifth chapter of said book is titled "Public Enemy #1: The Buffer Overrun" and it starts with a very interesting historical perspective on the problem, referring to the Morris Worm in 1986 as precedent, and even finding occurrences as far back as the 1960s.

Welcome to the twenty-fifth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, starting our third year with a rediscovery of Smalltalk. In this edition, Graham explains that Smalltalk was not a pink plane improvement; Adrian dipped his toes in Smalltalk and wrote about his experience; and in the Library section, Graham describes the greatest contributions of Kent Beck to software engineering.

As computing projects go, particularly foundational computing projects, the history of Smalltalk is well-documented, so a potted version will suffice here. Xerox hired someone in Palo Alto to hire a lot of other people, and invent things that would lead to interesting new lines of business for the company. Along the way, this group invented personal computing, the mouse, the graphical user interface, Ethernet networking, the laser printer, object-oriented programming, video conferencing, and provided the creativeness behind trillions of dollars of new products and markets.

I must start this article of mine about Smalltalk with a disclaimer: it took me weeks to work out what to talk about for the Smalltalk issue of De Programmatica Ipsum. I just do not know anything about it. I had to learn an unknown programming language with a clear deadline. And to do that, I decided to rewrite one of my hobby projects with it. This article will outline the steps I followed as an absolute beginner, the sources of information that helped, and how I ended up with my first working application written in Smalltalk.