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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#31

Post by boris »

dws wrote: post #5

From 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 ver…

> There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures...

And the most successful company of that era (Google) went ahead and implemented their product (the search engine) in C++...

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#32

Post by jecel »

Those are all very good points.

Since Allen was there and I was not he is in a far better position to know. But my impression was that the Smalltalk group had been reasonably happy with their 8086 based NoteTaker computer and expected their partners (HP, Tektronix, Apple and DEC) to use commercial processors instead of designing custom ones. Even if they were far slower than the Xerox Dorado.

About Squeak in a web browser, it was a completely different project than the current SqueakJS. Alan was frustrated that the IT people at schools wouldn't allow Squeak to be installed on their machines. So the native code VM was bundled into a plugin for the then popular web browsers and it became as easy to use Squeak as Flash. Except that the IT people allowed Flash but not Squeak so it ended up not helping. But in terms of performance it was better than Flash, Java (not Hotspot) or Javascript.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#34

Post by dragonwriter »

Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #33

The infantile interface and oh-so-precious baby talk that accompanies Squeak (a modern vision of Smalltalk 80) put me off the several times that I started to use it.

So, why not just go to Pharo, which is both more modern and less child-oriented in presentation than Squeak, from which it derives?

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#35

Post by jecel »

travisgriggs wrote: post #21

One of the things that Allen only barely hints at and I'm not sure Gilads piece really touches on was the shifting economics in Software development. In 1995/96 when Java gut punched the wind out of Smalltalk and the other OO solutions (CLOS, Eifel, Beta, etc), they spent a butt load on marketing and gave the stuff away for free. In other industries it would be called "dumping." It wasn't just Sun giving Java away. I…

Not only did Sun lose a lot of money on Java, they got other people (I remember Borland and IBM but there were probably others) to throw away money for a few critical years. Why the new CEO of the merged ParcPlace/Digitalk thought it would be good idea to abandon the lucrative Smalltalk niche to focus his company on this bloodbath I will probably never know.

https://www.cbronline.com/news/parcplace_throws_in_smalltalk...

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#36

Post by blihp »

boris wrote: post #31
dws wrote: post #5

From 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 ver…

> There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures... And the most successful company of that era (Google) went ahead and implemented their product (the search engine) in C++...

It's one thing when a tech company with lots of technical talent like Google decides to build its own (core) tools in a language like C++. It's another thing entirely when large numbers of IT departments, who have vastly more business than technical knowledge, try to build sprawling business applications in it. That's where most of the failures were occurring and why they were looking at Smalltalk, Java etc.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#37

Post by tarkin2 »

pixelrevision wrote: post #4
hodgesrm wrote: post #2

Speaking 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.

I only did a small amount of squeak programming many years after smalltalk’s heyday but I found the live interface incredibly productive. It was lisp’s image based systems with an incredibly useful gui. I created a small audio app with it very quickly.

I wish more languages would incorporate it. The closest thing I know of is inspecting DOM elements through javascript’s debugger and using the developer console to run operations on them. But that only lasts until you press refresh.

With smalltalk, seeing an object and then being able to edit the object and then making it interact with other objects made OOP come alive, rather than Java’s inheritance soup with dubiously modelled classes that eventually made developers want to throw away OOP.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#39

Post by diegof79 »

non-entity wrote: post #7
alrs wrote: post #6

I 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?

I worked for 3 years using VisualAge and GemStone/S.

As Allen says in the article, Squeak was a special case: based on Smalltalk-80 is oriented to have an environment to support the experimentation with e-toys (a platform for learning).

Other Smalltalks were different. VisualAge supports native UIs, and you have tools to produce the final product. The usual process is to create a reduced image based on modules that you load from the version control system (Envy in the case of VisualAge). Then you package an EXE that uses your image.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#40

Post by TurboHaskal »

entha_saava wrote: post #16
alrs wrote: post #6

I 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…

Thanks for the comment. When people talk about smalltalk or lisp, downsides are rarely mentioned.

Definitely true for Smalltalk but not for Lisp in my experience. The latter has its fair share of haters even on HN.
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