Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'm confused, where did the GP say anything about the GPL stopping him/her from using it?
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If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who understands Rust's good points (and there are many) is probably already using Haskell. What compelling advantage does Rust have over Haskell to justify the cost of switching (and, more importantly, the cost of losing higher-kinded types, and of adding macros)? Manual memory management is unlikely to be enough.
I see. I was thinking generally about tools / libs / ecosystem, and platform presence. I actually didn't realize Haskell was already so established.
It is established among a very competent, smart, and vocal community. It is not established as a language heavily used in industry or most open source projects by any means.
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#33A lot of people point out here Smalltalk is not great. I personally don't know either ways, because I haven't used it.
However, I do want to point out that adoption and quality need not be correlated. Haskell, for e.g., was relatively obscure till recently (and even now I would say very few people use it). But it is absolutely amazing compared to most mainstream languages.
The article linked makes some excellent points about business and other considerations and how it influences adoption of any language/tech (other than the quality itself).
The question itself can be reframed either as "Is Smalltalk good?" or "Why does noone use Smalltalk?"
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#34The consultants who can sell it to gullible managers have moved on to selling something else.
That something else was Java. One of the answers could be that almost every OO language borrowed some concepts form Smalltalk and implemented them in a less "cryptic" (or esoteric) way. Take a closer look at that Objective-C. Erlang's (non-OO) modules and message-passing primitives were also influenced by Smalltalk.
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Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#35I'd say there are two currently popular languages that are significantly influenced by Smalltalk: ruby and ObjC.
They are both quite different languages, but both very heavily influenced by smalltalk.
ObjC is mainly popular because it's the language you have (or until recently had) to use to write for iOS -- although many developers come to like it for itself, and it certainly has been succesful at Getting Things Done. (I believe iOS itself is written in it as well, if not OSX too?)
Ruby had no such vendor lock-in, so the only reason to use it originally was if you liked it, although at this point the large library of open source available for it encourages it's use. (Of course people had to like it enough to write that open source for it, something got the ball rolling and kept it rolling)
Both ruby and ObjC take different things (with some overlap), but there are some things that _neither_ takes from Smalltalk. Looking at the things neither takes from smalltalk (eg the "program as image" that means you can't just use a text editor to inspect or use effectively in a generic version control system)... probably suggests some possible answers to why smalltalk hasn't been more successful.
I am not familiar enough with Smalltalk to be confident in my suspicions, but comparing to the more popularly succesful languages ruby and ObjC is probably a fruitful avenue to answer that question.
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#36Put simply: because the things that made Smalltalk great are now part of modern stacks. Dependency management, interactive development tools, object-browsing IDEs, plus virtual machines improved significantly. Why go back to Smalltalk when we have all of these things with the language of our choice today?
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#37Cost. Smalltalk was proprietary and very expensive. Had the Smalltalk houses made open source free versions and monetized with consulting instead of software sales, I suspect things would be different.
The technical issues people cite are not so different with the dynamic languages that were much more successful (Perl, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, etc).
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#38Maybe Self was the best chance. We all know that java has won, but Self could have been Java (and thus the success of smalltalk). Maybe my understanding of this history is imcomplety, if it is please help me out.
Java should never have reached where it is today. Im not hatting on java btw. Just historiclly speaking, java was a embeded language that was pushed for the internet. At the same time Sun had the well advanced Self project in devlopment. One of the major reasons that java was selected was its small stack based bytecode.
Self was the hotbed of compiler research and could run rings around java. Self is a small language and you need less lines of code then java. Self would probebly not have been much heavier on the wire.
So why did the people at sun push Java and not Self? I can not explain it. The only explaition, is that they just did not know what they have. Anybody has a better idea, is there something I completly misunderstand?
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#39Put simply: because the things that made Smalltalk great are now part of modern stacks. Dependency management, interactive development tools, object-browsing IDEs, plus virtual machines improved significantly. Why go back to Smalltalk when we have all of these things with the language of our choice today?
Because smalltalk integrates those things together better than any other language / environment that has them?
Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It
#40It might just be waiting for the creation of the framework that will make it sexy and popular... like what Rails did to Ruby.