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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#101

Post by gilbetron »

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.

Not the OP, and I don't have any specific examples, but this was at the height of Waterfall (not in name, but in principle), where it was generally still taught as the way. Agile wasn't even a glimmer yet, but Extreme Programming was what Agile is now - interesting ideas, but mostly horribly executed.

Plus OO was at it's height as well, and C++ was seen as being incapable of handling OO sophistication, but Smalltalk could! (spoiler: it couldn't either) Then Java came and took over, and while it is a great language, it turns out massive, sophisticated OO approaches just breed their own complexity and so it picked up the "bad" moniker (it isn't), and now we find ourselves in other waters with a lot better understanding of everything, but still with a long way to go!

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#102

Post by alrs »

rauhl wrote: post #68
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…

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 had. I wrote some Applesoft BASIC as a kid, and was handy enough with LOGO that they brought in teachers from around the city to have me teach them at age 12. My first and only lisp.

The other side of this story is that I always encourage people to keep their modern-day children away from BASIC, at it only makes learning any other language harder.

My bad Smalltalk experience is hard to imagine today: Hey kid, here's a language that can only be written in one IDE on one operating system. Don't worry that the IDE doesn't run on your Linux computer, because the programs that you write won't run on your computer, either. The artifacts you generate won't be files, they'll be images. We're not going to actually cover that part, so when you're ready to turn this in you'll need to copy-and-paste the working code into your email client. You'll know it's ready when you press "F5" and nothing bad happens.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#104

Post by jecel »

russellallen wrote: post #67
Rochus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately the version in Squeak is, in my opinion, fancy looking but a backwards step from the Self version in terms of the underlying system. Morphic doesn't seem to really fit all that well with class based systems.

While being class based does make Squeak's Morphic a bit more awkward than Self's, the big difference is that it is a hybrid system that can run older MVC (Model View Controller) applications with little or no modification. That means that there are two different ways of doing most things and someone looking for examples to copy might run across the MVC version instead of the "proper" Morphic version.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#105

Post by hodgesrm »

e12e wrote: post #98
hodgesrm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Correct. MS SQL Server is based on the Sybase 4.2 release. System 10 was 3 releases later (4.8 & 4.9 added MP and internationalization support respectively).

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#106

Post by dws »

7786655 wrote: post #99
dws wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Looks like that changed after Raspian Jessie. Still, that shipped on a lot of Pis.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#108

Post by Rochus »

dws wrote: post #107
Rochus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These were the Self people.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot There was serious intermingling back then.

Have a look at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238853?dl=GUIDE&Want...

There is also a lecture video in the Supplemental Material section.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#109

Post by eitland »

e12e wrote: post #96
eitland wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Are you looking for a smalltalk job? :-)

Re: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk

#110

Post by e12e »

eitland wrote: post #109
e12e wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Are you looking for a smalltalk job? :-)

It certainly sounds intriguing...
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