Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
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Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
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Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#2Still relevant today? In 1988, I was briefed by Ibm how they would use Smalltalk with about 10 programmer develop something to ... do not believe them for 1s.
What is the business model is then what Microsoft teach the world. It is not technology but the business (the share to the inventor and investor) or later in 1990s (we learn from open sources) the governance and partipation model that rule.
Also, it is dynamic and environment base then, how to work in a large team is not that resolve for new firm to use it.
Hence once again a 2018 to 1998 me, is this still relevant.
I read this btw during my 15min search about this and give up. Like 1988.
https://medium.com/@richardeng/mobile-smalltalk-c6f0cc712909
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#3Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad.
Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free software" and sell their consulting on top of it. You may be able to take pride in the quality of your work, but that consultant can't afford to so he won't. And things get worse.
If you sell a piece of popular software to many people for $100 each you could still make a lot of money, but how does your consultant fit into this? You're still competing with him, and he's willing to build on top of someone elses' work to do so. He's not delivering $100 worth of value (and doesn't charge that much either), so how can you still afford to make great software?
I feel shame if I can't make good software, and I don't want to make software so badly that I'll make bad software, but nobody pays well enough to make good software, and the market is so messed up it's almost impossible to sell commercial software that isn't bundled up as a solution of some kind.
I can get around this some by selling SAAS on prem., but there's a limited utility in this: I could never build a new Smalltalk this way. Rust and Go have seemingly massive benefactors, but paying meagre salaries to their swarms of developers and activists: Nobody is getting rich but the vassals who were already rich to begin with. I've got a great idea for a new kind of programming language, but I don't have even a few million I can spend building it.
It makes me sad that I can get paid so much more to not make software than I can get paid to make software.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#4Still relevant today? In 1988, I was briefed by Ibm how they would use Smalltalk with about 10 programmer develop something to ... do not believe them for 1s. What is the business model is then what Microsoft teach the world. It is not technology but the business (the share to the inventor and investor) or later in 1990s (we learn from open sources) the governance and partipation model that rule. Also, it is dynamic…
i am struggeling to understand what you are trying to say. could you please elaborate?
what is it that you don't believe about IBM?
and what is your point about large teams and new firms?
here are my thoughts:
if you didn't think smalltalk was useful in 1988 then you probably won't feel any different today.
i feel today that smalltalk is interesting. in 1988 it would have blown my mind. here is why: today most languages in use fall into two major groups: lower level languages like C and C++ where you do your own memory management, etc. and higher level languages that use some form of runtime and do a lot of work for you. when i was studying in the early 90s, i felt that the latter group of languages were not taken seriously. they were called scripting languages and were more or less only useful for toy programs. (i know that is wrong, but that is what i was led to believe). today these so called toy languages are growing and growing and they are slowly pushing C/C++ and related languages to the side. we get more and new variants of these languages every year.
but, and that is the kicker: hardly any of these languages add something that smalltalk (and lisp) didn't already have. we keep reinventing the syntax, but we are not actually changing how we program computers. exceptions are few and far between.
additionally, smalltalk (and lisp) achieve the same with a minimalist and thus much easier to learn syntax, so that since learning those two languages, almost all others feel like a step backwards.
this is what makes smalltalk relevant today. smalltalk and lisp act like a high-water-mark, as a reminder that most of the languages we are using today don't float our boat any higher than it did 50 years ago.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#5Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
Twenty years ago (crikey, that long?), I was a pretty vocal Open Source advocate. At the time, it seemed like the only way to avoid a Microsoft monoculture, and I'm still not sure that wasn't true. But now we're seeing monocultures of corporate-sponsored open source (Chrome/Blink's dominance seems particularly alarming in this sense), and managers who are more reluctant than ever to accept technical solutions which aren't "standard".
I'd love to know how to bring back a bit more diversity to everyday computing. Beyond using niche systems for hobby projects, leverage seems rather limited right now.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#6Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
Nothing stops the others who are contributing to that consultant’s underlying free software from taking pride in their work. Nothing stops you from spending your bench time improving (or replacing!) that free software with others.
Free Software is good for the users of software, which is ultimately good for developers, because ultimately we're all users of software first and developers second.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#7Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
I see the major culprints devs that want to get paid, while refusing wholeheartedly to pay in any form for the work of others.
We see it all the time here, a forum supposedly for people doing their own business projects.
A ShowHN of any commercial tool is followed by endless threads of commercial software is evil and free clones or partial implementations to avoid paying for such tool.
So that leaves enterprise shops as the only customers to make money off selling tooling.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#8Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
I see the major culprints devs that want to get paid, while refusing wholeheartedly to pay in any form for the work of others. We see it all the time here, a forum supposedly for people doing their own business projects. A ShowHN of any commercial tool is followed by endless threads of commercial software is evil and free clones or partial implementations to avoid paying for such tool. So that leaves enterprise shops…
This is definitely a big factor, but when did it occur?
A long time ago I purchased Turbo C++, and then Watcom, but as soon as GCC got good enough I never paid for another compiler again.
I would love to make a great compiler, but how could I afford to when I'm competing with free?
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#9Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
Twenty years ago (crikey, that long?), I was a pretty vocal Open Source advocate. At the time, it seemed like the only way to avoid a Microsoft monoculture, and I'm still not sure that wasn't true. But now we're seeing monocultures of corporate-sponsored open source (Chrome/Blink's dominance seems particularly alarming in this sense), and managers who are more reluctant than ever to accept technical solutions which a…
The Cloud is similarly tricky: As we can factor our non-essential costs and push them to someone who can trade on their efficiency- there may still be competitors to Amazon, but monoculture is creating a strangling-effect there as well.
I'm hoping that privacy and legislative effects will force companies to pull more things in-house so that they can provide controls and guarantees about their use. This can be good for software: If your medical data has to be on-prem, they have to build the right security controls to do so. If it can be in the Cloud, then they just need the security controls on paper. That creates a risk that maybe we can convince people to understand.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#10Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free s…
Nothing stops the others who are contributing to that consultant’s underlying free software from taking pride in their work. Nothing stops you from spending your bench time improving (or replacing!) that free software with others. Free Software is good for the users of software, which is ultimately good for developers, because ultimately we're all users of software first and developers second.
Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs.
If we spend it making software, and we're competing with people working for free, we are simply not going to make as much money as we could be doing something else, so here's what happens:
People who love writing software, who are basically willing to work for free, will continue to write software. Some of them are good, but most of them are not.
People who are good at writing software, are also probably good at other things, and they will not program.
We have a similar problem with teachers: Surely you have heard teachers get paid poorly! We could pay them more and attract smart good teachers, or the smart good people who could also teach will do something else.
Free Software is still good, and I don't think it's useful to confuse the issue by pretending I'm saying otherwise.