If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It • Hacker News Board

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#11

Post by protomyth » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 7:56 PM UTC

I liked Smalltalk and saw it used well and used badly, but I don't think it is anything about Smalltalk that was the problem. It was the Smalltalk vendors that mostly screwed it up. Thousands of dollars per seat just wasn't worth it. It didn't help that some companies regarded it as "secret weapon" and kept its use hush-hush (I've heard the same thing about APL derivatives, but have no idea if that is just urban legend).

I figured if someone had built a VB like environment for Windows and priced it at $99, it would have done well. Closest I saw was Dolphin, but they did the old "database connection extra" crud. I wonder how many development environments have died due to that one pricing checkbox.

Smalltalk could be fast. Smalltalk/X was pretty speedy.

(PS - totally ignoring the native platform look and feel was foolish in the extreme)

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#12

Post by andywood » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 7:58 PM UTC

andywood wrote: post #4

A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing. Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.

Now, as a follow-up: is anything holding back Rust?

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#13

Post by jonahx » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 7:58 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #6

jonahx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument reduces to saying that anything popular and widely used is actually better than anything unpopular but beloved by language enthusiasts. This simply isn't the case. Many, many factors beyond merit contribute to language popularity and usage.

You have to have a metric for 'better'. If its 'utility' then yes something popular is better than something unused.

You're either saying something that is tautologically true (more popular things have more "utility" because they're used more because they're more popular), or is clearly false by any metric that a majority of experts in CS or language design, or even industry professionals, would agree on.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#14

Post by deeviant » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

jonahx wrote: post #5

andywood wrote: post #4

A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing. Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.

This argument reduces to saying that anything popular and widely used is actually better than anything unpopular but beloved by language enthusiasts. This simply isn't the case. Many, many factors beyond merit contribute to language popularity and usage.

Even though the basis of your statement, "Many, many factors beyond merit contribute to language popularity and usage," is true, actually defining the merits of these lesser used languages seems to be something that their fervent supporters are poor at.

I am not suggesting that these languages do not have tangible benefits, but I do wish their supportors would be a bit more concrete while describing them.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#15

Post by dschiptsov » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:01 PM UTC

ha292 wrote: post #9

The 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.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#16

Post by vixen99 » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:22 PM UTC

I haven't checked others but the publishers O'Reilly offer something like 8,000 titles related to IT. Open to correction but I can't see a single one on Smalltalk or Pharo. Is this simply because no publisher can see any return on investment? What do the Pharo developers think about this?

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#17

Post by snuxoll » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:24 PM UTC

I don't use it because at this point it's alien in the world of modern computers. Back when Smalltalk was in its prime it wasn't just a programming language, it was essentially your operating system, complete with its own graphics system, window manager, etc. This hasn't changed, but instead of being the basis of your system it's essentially another OS running on top of whatever your poison of choice is.

I think today the concept of the Smalltalk image and workspace has pretty much killed it, not the language itself. I use git for version control, I use GNOME as my desktop environment and IntelliJ as my IDE of choice, trying to do anything in smalltalk requires I transport myself back to the 90's.

GNU smalltalk is the closest we have to a smalltalk implementation that works well in modern computing environments, but there's a big lack of interest in the project.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#18

Post by killertypo » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:25 PM UTC

I worked in a Smalltalk shop, smalltalk is not that great. I've discussed it at length, my problems with it. As a language it is impressive what they built at the time. In practice it was a terrible pain in the ass with tons of "ravioli" code everywhere. The language has no qualms with letting you wreck havoc within the standard base classes, which makes integrating anothers code almost impossible.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#19

Post by killertypo » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:28 PM UTC

killertypo wrote: post #18

I worked in a Smalltalk shop, smalltalk is not that great. I've discussed it at length, my problems with it. As a language it is impressive what they built at the time. In practice it was a terrible pain in the ass with tons of "ravioli" code everywhere. The language has no qualms with letting you wreck havoc within the standard base classes, which makes integrating anothers code almost impossible.

Oh I do want to add that it is a language behind a paywall as well. Which i find rather strange. Being charged as a customer to one) use their language and two) being charged per user we allowed into the environment.

Because Smalltalk is an enclosed runtime (similar to Java, but much worse). We had to tell them how many users would be using non-developer editions of the runtime and they charged us for that.

Re: If Smalltalk Is So Good Why Does Nobody Use It

#20

Post by xorcist » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 8:30 PM UTC

Chinjut wrote: post #7

andywood wrote: post #4

A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing. Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.

A lot of people also spent a lot of time hating on Windows, which they only were so familiar with because it had already reached such overwhelming "critical mass in the wild". Does it follow that all these complaints were ultimately misguided? (I don't have any particularly strong opinions on Windows myself; it just seemed an apropos example for the Hacker News crowd. There are a million other examples of the same ty…

I think the point is that the complaints may all very well be valid, but that there is also the question what they did right. And Windows do get some important things (mostly) right, for example backwards compatibility.