131–140 of 232 posts
Could someone share a practical/industrial use case for this? E.g. can I build a SaaS, or a mobile app?
Could someone share a practical/industrial use case for this? E.g. can I build a SaaS, or a mobile app?
Also they have a GUI system ready so you can develop desktop apps (I'm not sure what the deployment story is like these days, but I assume it's fine).
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Thanks Java :(
Smalltalk first appeared in 1972, and was a stable commercial product by 1980. Java didn't hit the market until over a decade and a half later. If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start, then it's not the next generation's fault. It just wasn't going to happen.
Had IBM kept selling Visual Age products instead of jumping into Java ship, history would have turned out much differently.
Or if the Strongtalk guys hadn't return back to Sun and basically turn a Smalltalk VM into a Java one.
JUnit was also born in Smalltalk for those not paying attention.
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I've noticed that as well - it's a bit strange given that Pharo is a fork of Squeak, which does proclaim its ST origins on its front page. I wouldn't say Smalltalk has a bad rep nowadays, but it used to be knocked for being too expensive (the cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke), too slow, and producing nasty-looking non-native GUIs. These have almost all been fixed.
> cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke March 7, 1988 "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95" https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P... > nasty-looking non-native GUIs The "non-native GUI" was quite important because Smalltalk was running on MS-DOS — not on MS-Windows.
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Thanks Java :(
Smalltalk first appeared in 1972, and was a stable commercial product by 1980. Java didn't hit the market until over a decade and a half later. If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start, then it's not the next generation's fault. It just wasn't going to happen.
This is not true. Even the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book wasn't released until 1983.
> If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start
Historical context is important here. FOSS etc were not nearly as prevalent as they are now, and most major development environments had a price. The main Smalltalk players probably got it wrong by pricing out expensive licensing fees. But the head start does not matter when the next thing that comes along is released for free, which is what happened with Java.
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What is also rare is the quality of the site. Impressive.
Unless you’re on mobile…
I personally use smartphone as a phone, off-line GPS, camera (when I happen to not carry dedicated one) and to control various gismos like drones.
I do not use it for reading, viewing websites, computing, etc.
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> cost of ST licences back when was beyond a joke March 7, 1988 "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95" https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P... > nasty-looking non-native GUIs The "non-native GUI" was quite important because Smalltalk was running on MS-DOS — not on MS-Windows.
Well $200 in 1980s is something like $500 today. I don't think I own any piece of software costing that much.
Dec 1988, MS Word 5.0 for MS-DOS, $450.
Are there any perceived shortcomings of Smalltalk that caused it not to take hold?
To really take advantage of its strengths, one needs to adopt to a completely new IDE and way of working, which puts a lot of people off. On the other hand, if it were adopted to behave like all other environments, there would be objections again, "It's exactly the same as what I'm using now. So why switch?" It should be added that Pharo addressed most of the small problems that the original Smalltalk had.
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C never really fell out of favor, though. And it's also the only available choice apart from assembler in many circumstances. But trying to revive interest in Ada, D, Sather, Prolog, etc would be a lot more difficult.
It was already out of favour in the early 80's, hence C.A.Hoare turing award speech against it in 1980, but then UNIX took over the world anyway, and the FOSS wave with GNU Manifesto helped to take it further. Apparently people don't have any issue hanging to an OS about the same age as COBOL.
Why should they? It works for many cases and has mountains of apps, tooling, libraries, hardware support and whatnot. It takes decades for the new OS/ecosystem to mature.