71–80 of 141 posts
Sounds like another framework we’ve got today, except now at least it’s free.
Discussions 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/
What is so different in smalltalk that is not possible / easy in modern IDE+Debugger environments? Especially those with hot reload or 'Edit & Continue' features?
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 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.
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…
Are you a mobile app developer?
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…
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…
https://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong-2.html
For some people living in an environment/IDE works, other people feel locked in. It is certainly unusual if you are used to the Unix approach.
Since there are so many languages and so little time, I would think that many people haven't tried Smalltalk at all because of this hurdle.
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…
But what really killed that model wasn't the cost - it was the lack of lock-in.
For comparison, Oracle is still really, really expensive, but its market lock-in means that it won't be overtaken by Postgres for some time yet.
Languages are more disposable. There's significant pain involved in shifting to a different code base, but it's not nearly as painful as trying to extract your data from a proprietary DB that considers lock-in a feature.
Anyone here shipping a Smalltalk built application these days? I had fun playing with Pharo and Squeak, but in terms of shipping desktop apps to clients I don't know how it could be done with Smalltalk. Maybe Cincom is the only game in town, not sure. Anyone has a story to tell?
Every year we ask ourselves if we should be using such an niche tool but somehow almost every new employee at our company gets hooked on smalltalk. So it now has become our secret superpower.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had you programmed at all prior to college? I took my first college-level programming class a year earlier than you, using Smalltalk, and I hated the language. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But in high school I had programmed in C, and earlier than that in HyperTalk and earlier still in Basic. I was too immature at the time to see the similarities between HyperTalk and Smalltalk, and too hung up on what I thou…
I get the feeling it has a lot to do with how much your teacher loves the language. I was introduced to Common Lisp at university, didn't get it at all. At least Prolog could do cool tricks. Took me several years of Graham yabbering about it to make the effort, and to my surprise it was all that and more. I realize now that my teacher didn't have enough experience to really understand what was great about Lisp. I hav…
It opened my mind to an alternative universe of safe systems programing and computing models.
This kind of stuff is a bit like explaining monads I guess, it only groks if one goes through the experience themselves and it always hard to convince others just with words.