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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#91

Post by dws »

mardifoufs wrote: post #43
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, 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.

The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok now but make sense if you think back to mid-90's hardware, where of multi-day build and test runs causing projects to grind to near halts. Fertile, but painful, soil for the idea of "Refactoring" to take root in.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#92

Post by dws »

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++...

Years later. What later became Google was initially prototyped in Java and Python.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#93

Post by dws »

Rochus wrote: post #87
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.

Ironically Java was first and formost influenced by Simula 67 and C++, not by Smalltalk. The first Java version was essentially Simula 67 with a C like syntax. The influence of Smalltalk is generally overestimated.

You might take a look at how Java got its JIT.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#94

Post by [deleted] »

soapdog wrote: post #77

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?

[deleted]

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#95

Post by dws »

soapdog wrote: post #77

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?

Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) on millions of Raspberry Pis.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#96

Post by e12e »

eitland wrote: post #54
alrs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I assumed we were the biggest smalltalk community in Norway.

> Their answer was that we were probably the only real smalltalk community.

Were was/is this?

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#97

Post by alrs »

solarengineer wrote: post #44
non-entity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 am surprised that what alrs has said. At some point, one actually does poke around and understand what is going on to know how a system works. alrs states that they are contributing to K8s. That does require poking around to learn the plumbing of the system. You could very well write Smalltalk apps without poking around the underlying classes. The Visual Age for Smalltalk environment just made it very easy to do so…

I love poking around.

I love poking around with vi, more, and grep.

I cannot fathom how someone would want to poke around with a mouse while pointing, clicking, and peering into a little 2" x 2" dialog box.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#98

Post by e12e »

hodgesrm wrote: post #22
fulafel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened then, did it get rewritten in Java?

No, the project got cancelled before Java showed up. Sybase pretty much went down the tubes after that as a major DBMS vendor. Not because our project failed, but because Sybase had a dud release in 1993 named System 10 that had serious quality problems and tanked sales.

Heh, so that's just after the split of what became ms sql server on the Microsoft side.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase

> 1993: Sybase and Microsoft dissolve their partnership. Microsoft receives a copy of the SQL Server code base. (...) Sybase SQL Server version 4.2 and Microsoft SQL Server are identical. (...) From this point the products diverge as Microsoft includes more Windows features whilst Sybase adds Enterprise features (performance and scaling).

> June 1993: Sybase announces its latest generation of software, named the System 10 product family; (...)

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#99

Post by 7786655 »

dws wrote: post #95
soapdog wrote: post #77

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?

Scratch ( https://scratch.mit.edu ) on millions of Raspberry Pis.

It looks to me like only Scratch 1.4 is written in Squeak. Scratch 2 is written in ActionScript, and Scratch 3 in JavaScript.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#100

Post by Rochus »

dws wrote: post #93
Rochus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically Java was first and formost influenced by Simula 67 and C++, not by Smalltalk. The first Java version was essentially Simula 67 with a C like syntax. The influence of Smalltalk is generally overestimated.

You might take a look at how Java got its JIT.

These were the Self people.
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