It's also recommended to have a look at other pages from Allan's site such as http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/tek... which is full of interesting facts and documents.
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#52One 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_smalltal…
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Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#53[deleted]
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't like Smalltalk. It didn't work for the way your brain works, so much so that you failed a class twice. I'm not quite sure how this adds to the discussion. Clearly IDEs and having to "mouse-around through the available classes and methods" works for many people since this is how documentation in Xcode/Android Studio/Visual Studio works. If the documentation for one Smalltalk implementation was bad, that doe…
Absolutely. It's great hearing tales of people who used and loved Smalltalk. I'm pushing back against anyone repeating the received wisdom "zomg genius! it was too good to live in this fallen world" without having ever used it. I don't pretend to be a sample size greater than one, but I think it's worth noting that, in this batch of comments, if you only count the people who used Smalltalk, and not the people who saw…
> if you only count the people who used Smalltalk, and not the people who saw an old Alan Kay interview on Youtube, you're likely to be somewhere south of n=20.
To support your view:
A competitor "stole" a large maintenance project from us.
I suggested to someone at my company that they would have trouble recruiting as I assumed we were the biggest smalltalk community in Norway.
Their answer was that we were probably the only real smalltalk community.
They might be wrong, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that yet.
And that competitor kept calling all of my colleagues that had - at any point - worked anywere near smalltalk :-)
Even we do the vast majority of our development in other languages.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#55Does anyone know where the strange name VisualAge came from? Wikipedia says "The name "VisualAge" is the result of a contest between the members of the development team." with no reference, and I can't understand how such an opaque and irrelevant-seeming name could win such a contest. "Visual" I get, but "Age"?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures, Do you have any examples in mind? Big corporate software project failures are always super interesting imo. Especially those that happened during such pivotal times as rhe 1990s.
I wasn't there, but apparently Taligent was a failed C++ operating system from Apple and IBM in the 90's. I think there is a talk on YouTube by Bryan Cantrill that gives some color on it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent http://bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/the-taligent-effect/
The Digital Antiquarian also touches on Taligent in his post about the IBM/Apple "alliance" in the 90s:
https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/the-deal-of-the-century-or-th...
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#57I 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.
> Smalltalk and the ideas it was based on revolutionized personal computing. There is raw, unbridled genius in it and that should be widely recognized.
This is not historically correct. What we understand today by "personal computer" was described by Butler Lampson in his famous paper in 1972 and was first realized in the famous Alto Computer. The first desktop GUI and the first WYSIWYG applications for the Alto were implemented in BCPL (not Smalltalk). The first version of Smalltalk, which most closely corresponds to our todays understanding of Smalltalk, did not appear until 1976, and two other important features were not even introduced until 1980. So if you are looking for geniuses, you will need to increase your search range a little.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#58Discussions about Smalltalk almost always remind me of Self[0] from Sun. It is an extremely simple prototype-based programming language. An object can have many "parents", and defines properties on itself to expose an interface. It's really fun to mess around with. The Morphic UI is kind of archaic though. [0]: https://selflanguage.org/
Do you mean that the morphic ui is archaic looking ? Because my impression of it is that it is still ahead of its time technically.
What you can download from https://selflanguage.org/ looks rather archaic, not the improved version implemented on top of Squeak which looks and feals really fancy.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#59Does anyone know where the strange name VisualAge came from? Wikipedia says "The name "VisualAge" is the result of a contest between the members of the development team." with no reference, and I can't understand how such an opaque and irrelevant-seeming name could win such a contest. "Visual" I get, but "Age"?
I imagine they meant it in the sense of "entering a new age".
Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
#60For those of you smalltalk fans, what are you working in today / what would you prefer to be working in today given your history with smalltalk?
I'm not actually a "Smalltalk fan", but I recently re-implemented the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine and some additional tools to analyze the original Smalltalk-80 sources and virtual image files. My goal is to run it on LuaJIT and compare the performance with other Smalltalk implementations. See https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk. I'm also working on a Simula 67 compiler, and a Golang to LuaJIT bytecode compiler is also on my list. As you can see I write everything in C++, which also says something.