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

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

#71

Post by fizfaz » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 5:44 PM UTC

poulsbohemian wrote: post #36

Put 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?

out of interest, which modern stacks allow "live coding" your application? That is: no need to restart for various changes you make. You are playing/changing/creating with the objects that make your aplication.

I am currently doing mostly Objective-C-programming in Xcode, which is a rather simple IDE in this respect.

In the past I used more java, but at this time only simple changes were possible live (using Eclipse back then), for a lot of others I had to compile and restart anyway.

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

#72

Post by lmm » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:06 AM UTC

andywood wrote: post #29

lmm wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

I meant less that lots of people use Haskell and more that most C++ folks aren't interested in changing languages.

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

#73

Post by nickik » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 2:25 AM UTC

ltta wrote: post #44

nickik wrote: post #38

Maybe 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 advanc…

Java probably won because of its C-inspired syntax. At that point smalltalk was falling behind and C++ started to take off. To me Java was always meant as a better C++. At least that is my guess. A lot of the people behind Self went on to work on the JVM JIT and later the Chrome V8 engine. Self produced many influential ideas in the JIT space like polymorphic inline caches and deoptimization and stack rewriting. Some…

The syntax is something, but they could easly have written another parser for sell and make it look very C like. That would have been 100x less work.

Many of the people that worked on Self later worked on Strongtalk, that was bought and is the bases for the current JVM, and yes now everything that was in Self is in the JVM.

So my point is, why not just start where they ended up anyway. In one of David Ungars talks he said something like "they probebly just didn't know what they had". Thats about the only thing that makes sence, but maybe somebody knows more then me.

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

#74

Post by nickik » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #59

nickik wrote: post #38

Maybe 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 advanc…

Self has reincarnated as Javascript.

Yes, but thats the point. We could have had what we have now 10 years ago, or even more.

Sure hardwar got faster as well, but im talking quality of the VM.