Good old DT. Dave was a prof of mine in the late 1980's.. CompSci at Carleton in Ottawa, Canada. SmallTalk...my first reaction (95.202 for those that remember...) was WTF?? We had just done Pascal...SmallTalk just blew our minds. It was like you had to smoke dope first... you know, to get it. Many late nights in the lab... it was running in Mac emulation on ancient Lisa computers (I shit you not). Anyhow, none of really understood why we had to learn SmallTalk. There were certainly no summer jobs for SmallTalk guys (dBase? C? sure... ) But DT and the rest of the profs on the 5th floor extolled the value of Objects. Smalltalk is just the tool they said...to learn about OOP. DT always had the best lectures...he was a total blast to listen to. I may have even learned a few things. The only guys I knew that made a buck off of SmallTalk went to work for Dave at OTI. And then that got bought by IBM. Dave absolutely did well...I'm sure he's still smiling.
Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs. this is tragically naive ; the role of business management is to control and reduce price of inputs, every time. If something absolutely vital, essential, mission-critical can be obtained for less and less dollars out, it will be done. This is a prime "function of markets and competition" .. if you are talking ab…
I don't think you understand what I'm saying, and perhaps that's my fault for not putting it clearly enough:
If I can deliver a solution and I cost £500k, but some 20-something only costs £50k, then of course the customer is going to go with the cheaper option.
But if I want to make £500k, what ends up happening is that I (and others) don't program.
That's not a good thing if you value invention: Nobody can invent for £50k, and so long as that's the market rate, £500k problems simply won't get done. That is probably okay for businesses though who want solutions and not inventions.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
I'm certainly with you on The Cloud. I've been expecting a backlash for a while, but not much sign of it so far. A big monthly bill from $CLOUD_VENDOR_OF_CHOICE seems to have become this century's equivalent of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Makes me think: a few years ago, there was some or other beer in the UK that was (heavily) advertised with the slogan "reassuringly expensive". The Cloud vendors (perhaps AW…
Stella! And then everyone started calling it "wife beater", because whilst it was slightly more expensive, it had a higher alcohol content.
Weirdly I predict a similar fate: I expect some Cloud employee will walk off with some banks cloud-hosted server containing gobs of financial data (if it hasn't happened already) and that'll be the end of that. There'll probably be a rush of "security enhanced" cloud solutions after that, but it'll probably hurt them badly in the process.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.
Yes.
The one strange thing is that it seems to have caught IBM somewhat off-guard.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.
Yes. The one strange thing is that it seems to have caught IBM somewhat off-guard.
Yes, but now that they own Red-Hat and OpenShift, lets see how that goes.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Well, look at lispworks for example, that compiler costs $1500 for a hobbyist edition, i can't afford to pay for that. Maybe if you price your product reasonably for end users you can still sell software(including compilers/devtools), a lot of people pay for sublime text.
Sharing is important in this day an age.
If you develop some software that is dependent on Lispworks, how do you share it with others if what you are sharing depends on some Lispworks facility which isn't free?
I also believe that C++ is one of the reasons why some software is not easily shared.
Dynamic languages cannot use toolkits or libraries written in a language that is hard to interface to, Qt5 thats you. In fact I believe this is one of the main issues facing the dynamic languages, that there are no free well-featured cross-platform GUI toolkits they are able to integrate easily with.
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Well, look at lispworks for example, that compiler costs $1500 for a hobbyist edition, i can't afford to pay for that. Maybe if you price your product reasonably for end users you can still sell software(including compilers/devtools), a lot of people pay for sublime text.
There are some product areas where lowering the prices will not increase the market such that one can still pay salaries for employees... and still move the product forward through platform changes. Commercial Common Lisp seems to be such an area.
There were cheaper alternatives in the past. Let's compare a cheaper one with LispWorks:
Around 1986 began the story of MCL: Macintosh Common Lisp was a commercial product originally developed for the 68k Mac by a small company. At some point in time Apple bought it, but mostly to maintain it and use the technology&people to develop a different language (Dylan). When Apple lost interest, there was still enough of a user base to not let it die, but to have a small company selling the product - ported to the PowerPC - the new CPU for the Mac. So the company sold MCL for PowerPC to their customers. Then Apple switched to MacOS X. MCL was moved to MacOS X on PowerPC - using a compatibility library provided by Apple (Carbon). But MCL was not ported to Cocoa. Then Apple introduced the Intel based Mac. MCL ran with the compatibility layer on the PowerPC emulator - not that great. Then Apple gave up the PowerPC and gave up the emulator and gave up Carbon -> MCL was dead. What we have now is a free version of MCL called Clozure CL - which hasn't catched up with MCL's IDE... which is really sad, since it was liked by its users.
Same time - around 1986 - LispWorks was developed by Harlequin. Initially for the UNIX market: enterprise + universities. With IDE. After several years it was ported to Windows and the IDE technology was made independent from X11 (Motif + Windows). Several CPUs were supported - not just Intel. Harlequin (a company with many offerings) went out of business - the remains were bought and the Lisp business was transferred to a new company. Then LispWorks got ported to the new Mac OS X. With native support for Cocoa. Later the UNIX version moved away from Motif to GTK+. Recently the runtime was ported to Android and iOS. There is a constant stream of porting it to the current platforms - for example it has currently supported implementations for ARM, X64, POWER and SPARC - each in 32bit and 64bit variants.
Now we have the fate of two commercial products serving the small niche of Common Lisp developers:
a) the more affordable one, formerly available only for one platform. Now dead.
b) the expensive one, available for several currently popular operating systems.
The big question nobody has been able to answer successfully: is there a place for a Common Lisp (or similar) IDE getting more popular so that a lower price point is viable - the product has a longterm future, has full-time employees maintaining it and is not bound to a single platform and its fate?
If there were a positive answer to it, then either some of the formerly existing products in that price range would have survived (Golden Common Lisp, ExperCommon Lisp, Procyon Common Lisp, Corman Common Lisp, Macintosh Common Lisp, ...) or we would have seen successful new attempts after 2000 competing with an IDE-based product against the expensive Allegro CL and LispWorks offerings.
Sublime Text is $80. Can we see a CL implementation for a smaller market (yes, there are more users for a general text editor than Lisp developers) which costs $80 AND which pays the rent for its developer(s)? Corman Lisp did cost $200 and did not survive...
Btw., this topic has been discussed a lot in the CL community. For years...
Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, look at lispworks for example, that compiler costs $1500 for a hobbyist edition, i can't afford to pay for that. Maybe if you price your product reasonably for end users you can still sell software(including compilers/devtools), a lot of people pay for sublime text.
There are some product areas where lowering the prices will not increase the market such that one can still pay salaries for employees... and still move the product forward through platform changes. Commercial Common Lisp seems to be such an area. There were cheaper alternatives in the past. Let's compare a cheaper one with LispWorks: Around 1986 began the story of MCL: Macintosh Common Lisp was a commercial product…
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Re: Travels with Smalltalk (1995)
#30Inside 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…
This argument assumes developers have access to the market. In reality most of us are not in a position to benefit directly from selling software, regardless of how "good" or "bad" it is. We can only sell our labour for a pre-negotiated salary to an employer who will then pocket the profits. In such an environment, sharing, taking pride in, and building upon each other's work makes a lot of sense and works in the developer's long-term interest (as well as your employer-du-jour's).
Free software, just like proprietary, could be of good or bad quality. This depends on the people who wrote it, not so much on the choice of licensing terms.
> It makes me sad that I can get paid so much more to not make software than I can get paid to make software.
I can relate.