The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
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Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#2Speaking as a Smalltalk programmer active in the 1990s we pretty much dropped everything when Java showed up. It had the things we loved in Smalltalk (portable virtual machine, garbage collection, self-documenting APIs, collection classes, etc.) with the familiar syntax of C++ and concurrency.
In a way Smalltalk prepared the way for Java in that it showed how great VMs and garbage collection were.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#3Speaking as a Smalltalk programmer active in the 1990s we pretty much dropped everything when Java showed up. It had the things we loved in Smalltalk (portable virtual machine, garbage collection, self-documenting APIs, collection classes, etc.) with the familiar syntax of C++ and concurrency. In a way Smalltalk prepared the way for Java in that it showed how great VMs and garbage collection were.
I can't understand. People says that ST ecosystem is much superior to nowadays languages, so why people at that time switched to the starter version of java, that is so bad compared to today? After the shift, did you miss something?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#4Speaking as a Smalltalk programmer active in the 1990s we pretty much dropped everything when Java showed up. It had the things we loved in Smalltalk (portable virtual machine, garbage collection, self-documenting APIs, collection classes, etc.) with the familiar syntax of C++ and concurrency. In a way Smalltalk prepared the way for Java in that it showed how great VMs and garbage collection were.
It’s funny because I’ve only started using it recently and what really captivates me is the live environment. The fact that you can dig in and evaluate/change everything in the same environment you are running it provides an amazing feedback loop. To me it really seems like the “killer feature” of the language but I can’t think of any modern language that has adopted it.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#5From inside ParcPlace, it looked like we were starting to gain traction. There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures, and people seemed to be willing to try this weird, new (to them) thing that let them get prototypes up quickly and then grow them.
Then Java arrived and sucked all of the air and mindshare out of the ecosystem.
Java lucked into ideal circumstances, and Sun Marketing played their hand very well. The Web was just taking off, VCs were looking for something new and hot, publishers were looking for the next big thing, and programmers were looking for something that wasn't C++. Java looked familiar enough, cost nothing, had Garbage Collection and Interfaces (putting Gang of Four Patterns within reach of many), and let programmers keep their favorite tools and editors instead of adopting Smalltalk's strange model of doing everything in a (mostly) sealed environment.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#6I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk.
1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95.
2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods.
3. The text was the IBM manual. It was terrible.
4. I failed the class twice, so I changed majors.
I didn't come back to coding until ten years later.
I'm a contributor to Kubernetes, the Go Standard Library, and I'm a full-time Go developer. Things turned out OK.
Smalltalk, OO, and IDE-based development set my career back by ten years. Don't believe the hype.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#7I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk. 1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95. 2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods. 3. The text was the IBM manu…
> I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods.
So I dont know a ton about smalltalk outside of what I've read and poking aside in squeak for a few minutes, but is this how smalltalk apps were supposed to be distributed and run? Inside a sandboxes system like that?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#8I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk. 1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95. 2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods. 3. The text was the IBM manu…
I can't see Go as anything more than tripe aimed at commoditized development. Yay at being a cog in a giant machine.
Smalltalk and the ideas it was based on revolutionized personal computing. There is raw, unbridled genius in it and that should be widely recognized.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#9It was pretty amazing going to JDK 1 and seeing names in the source code I remembered from doing VisualWorks Smalltalk.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#10I took my first college-level programming class in 1997, learning Smalltalk. 1. IBM VisualAge didn't run in Linux, so I had to buy a second hard drive and a copy of Windows 95. 2. I wanted to be working in a terminal, Smalltalk only let you work in an IDE. I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't believe that anyone would want to mouse-around to poke through the available classes and methods. 3. The text was the IBM manu…
I can't see Go as anything more than tripe aimed at commoditized development. Yay at being a cog in a giant machine. Smalltalk and the ideas it was based on revolutionized personal computing. There is raw, unbridled genius in it and that should be widely recognized.
Who's to disagree with your aesthetic judgement? You're not wrong to like it, if you like it.
I found it sufficiently obtuse that I walked away from my life's dream. The nostalgia circuit touts it as an amazing educational environment, in my experience it was not.