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I have a question to people who used smalltalk. Maybe I have read it somewhere but couldn't understand the unique advantage in modern day terms. 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 have a question to people who used smalltalk. Maybe I have read it somewhere but couldn't understand the unique advantage in modern day terms. 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?
On a proper Smalltalk environment, beyond a set of pre-defined VM intrinsics you can access and change everything, GC, JIT compiler, compiler, how the debugger works, IDE like features, you name it. Then it is very uniform, everything is an object, even it isn't implemented as such, it is transparent for your as developer.
The only other kind of environments that went as far were the Interlisp-D and Lisp Machines, to some extent the surviving commercial Common Lisps.
"Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback (think IDE and OS rolled into one)."
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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…
I'm convinced that Smalltalk was so far ahead of its time, that it will take several decades [if it happens at all] before "programmers" get equivalent functionality from mainstream development platforms. Which is fine by me, since I am an EE by day and view programming as an artistic process thus do it for fun, not money. Which is another reason why Smalltalk failed in the market. It was made by geniuses and was aimed at art & research, not a bunch of cogs stuck in cubicles.
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…
Have you done any work in Ruby?
Has anyone recently used Pharo Smalltalk? How did its IDE functionality enhance your experience? "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment, focused on simplicity and immediate feedback (think IDE and OS rolled into one)." https://pharo.org/features
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.
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>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/
Once upon a time, there was a company called Taligent, which was created by IBM and Apple to develop a set of tools and libraries like Cocoa. About the time Taligent reached the peak of its mindshare, I met one of its engineers at a trade show. I asked him to create a simple application for me: A window would appear with a button, and when the button was clicked, the words “Hello, World!” would appear in a text field. The engineer created a project and started subclassing madly: subclassing the window and the button and the event handler. Then he started generating code: dozens of lines to get the button and the text field onto the window. After 45 minutes, I had to leave. The app still did not work. That day, I knew that the company was doomed. A couple of years later, Taligent quietly closed its doors forever.
It is asserted a bit later than C++ was the problem.
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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.
Smalltalk was inspirational, but the environment was a double-edged sword. In ParcPlace Smalltalk even things like stack frames were editable classes. One of the first mistakes I made was trying to edit the stack frame class in a running VM. It immediately corrupted the VM. BTW another brilliant innovation of Smalltalk was incremental compilation. Edit a method, save, and it was instantly part of the runtime. It must…
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_smalltal…