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What a bunch of baloney. Smalltalk didn't invent message passing. Even if it did, Ruby is an obvious descendant of Smalltalk. Messaging in Smalltalk and messag

What a bunch of baloney. Smalltalk didn't invent message passing. Even if it did, Ruby is an obvious descendant of Smalltalk. Messaging in Smalltalk and messaging in Erlang are almost completely different. There's nothing remotely asynchronous about messaging in Smalltalk. Docker and LINQ? You're insane. MVC has to do with this how? MVC has enjoyed continuous popularity since its invention. And of course partly this is because MVC keeps getting post-facto redefined, much like messaging. The Controller in original Smalltalk MVC translated keycodes into messages to the model. This is pretty different from the role of the controller in Rails, where it acts as the be-all dispatcher. Also, look at the most direct descendants of Smalltalk's MVC concept: Morphic, which is an unmitigated disaster with no controller at all, and Cocoa, which eventually replaced almost all the controllers with three stock ones. Everybody doing anything like a GUI is using MVC, but almost nobody is doing it like Smalltalk originally did, including Smalltalk today. JVM and V8 owing their performance to Smalltalk hackers just means that dynamic languages get optimized similarly to each other, and the people who did it the first time had the experience to do it again. There's almost nothing of Smalltalk in Javascript. Some of the same people being involved? So what, James Gosling and Guy Steele were huge influences in Java, do you see any goddamn Common Lisp in there? Gosling thought the central idea of Lisp was that it was garbage collected! Atom isn't integrated with Javascript, it's an editor built on Javascript. If you think this is like Smalltalk, where the editor and the code are alive together in the same process image, you've totally missed it. And by the way, as wonderful as this is, it also means you can trash your image and lose code. This is an interesting idea but having lost work to it I am not at all convinced it is a good idea. VBA? Browser Dev Tools? I feel like I'm reading a recruiter-authored job post here, not a Hacker News comment. Your interpretation of what has happened with Smalltalk is seriously confused. I think you've mixed up cause and effect, similarity with equivalence and allowed a cult of personality to override technical truths. This is the birth of a cult, not an honest appraisal of progress. Smalltalk is a really interesting idea. Some of the insights from it have enjoyed wider success. But most of your heroes have moved on from it, and rightfully. If you want to keep the candle burning you should be honest with yourself about why that happened, rather than trying to rewrite history to fit your narrative.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
Why so angry? Even if it did, Ruby is an obvious descendant of Smalltalk. So you agree with him. Ruby's most powerful feature is the combination of OO and blocks. That's Smalltalk through and through. MVC has to do with this how? MVC has enjoyed continuous popularity since its invention. And of course partly this is because MVC keeps getting post-facto redefined, much like messaging. The Controller in original Smalltalk MVC translated keycodes into messages to the model. This is pretty different from the role of the controller in Rails, where it acts as the be-all dispatcher. Also, look at the most direct descendants of Smalltalk's MVC concept: Morphic, which is an unmitigated disaster with no controller at all, and Cocoa, which eventually replaced almost all the controllers with three stock ones. Everybody doing anything like a GUI is using MVC, but almost nobody is doing it like Smalltalk originally did, including Smalltalk today. So, again, you agree with him? MVC has been refined, but it still has a basis in Smalltalk. JVM and V8 owing their performance to Smalltalk hackers just means that dynamic languages get optimized similarly to each other, and the people who did it the first time had the experience to do it again. There's almost nothing of Smalltalk in Javascript. Of course he's referring to Strongtalk, which was the basis for the JVM. Javascript is clearly inspired by Self which is a descendant of Smalltalk. You've got some good points but they'd be easier to take if you weren't being so rude about them. This is the birth of a cult, not an honest appraisal of progress. How is it the birth of a cult when as you've said people are moving on?
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  I'm angry because the cult-building around Smalltalk is stupid and I fell for it and wasted years trying to see what was there. - It's stupid because you can use Pharo today; Smalltalk isn't dead. Try it and find out if it's great. They're trying as hard as they can to keep it relevant and it's a constant struggle because they have to build from scratch everything Smalltalk didn't invent. - It's stupid because tiny languages like Smalltalk beget huge libraries; I have owned ~20 books on Smalltalk and all but two of them were essentially useless tours of defunct libraries. (The other two are fantastic and useful no matter what language you're using, if it's OOP.) - It's stupid because most of what was powerful about Smalltalk is either nowhere in sight or became mainstream years ago. I'm angry at the cult-building because it builds nostalgia instead of systems. It makes it easy to spurn what we have and make excuses for our own non-productivity—obviously I'd be so much more productive if only it were 1985 and I had Smalltalk! If Smalltalk GUI building is so great, how come nobody uses it today? Because it's maddeningly inferior to everything we have today. Take your "Javascript fatigue" and try out Morphic, tonight. Here's a bottle of Rogaine and vue-cli for when you lose your hair and sanity trying that little experiment. The cult-building is maddening because it misses the truly amazing things. To appreciate the amazing things requires immersion, and immersion sucks! You know, if you make a web app with Seaside and it throws an exception, you can serialize the debug window, bring it down to your image and continue the debugging session locally. The serialization works on blocks, which is to say closures, so you get the whole state of the app locally. Has the OP tried this lately? Because it only works if you use the newest serialization method, if you have exactly the same code in both images, and once you make the change in your local image, how do you get it up to the server again? Oh, you either have to endure the awful homegrown Monticello VCS (inseparable from its insufferable GUI, because Smalltalk) or you have to do the file-out file-in trick with git, because Smalltalk hates external tools. It's a cult because MVC, in the overarching sense that it would have to mean to be applicable to all the aforementioned systems, would have arisen organically without Smalltalk because it's just a sensible design. It's a cult because messaging in the broadest sense that must be meant by including completely different things like Erlang and LINQ predates Smalltalk. If you ascribe things to Smalltalk (or influential people who happened to use Smalltalk) that did not originate in Smalltalk, you are taking Smalltalk as more important than history or fact, and that is the essence of building a cult. Methods-as-messages originate in Smalltalk, sure. If you say Smalltalk invented that, that's true. But of the five things mentioned, only Ruby has that. Java, Javascript, LINQ and Erlang do not. They are not Smalltalk's inheritors; they don't owe their concepts to Smalltalk, even if the same people worked on it. Smalltalk was great, is great. Pharo is great. What makes it a cult is the alpha-and-omega bullshit. Great ideas happened before and after Smalltalk. They chose general names for specific ideas. History is mutilated if we ascribe to Smalltalk the general ideas or give Smalltalk credit for unrelated things because some of the same folks were in the room.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

Why so angry? Even if it did, Ruby is an obvious descendant of Smalltalk. So you agree with him. Ruby's most powerful feature is the combination of OO and blocks. That's Smalltalk through and through. MVC has to do with this how? MVC has enjoyed continuous popularity since its invention. And of course partly this is because MVC keeps getting post-facto redefined, much like messaging. The Controller in original Smalltalk MVC translated keycodes into messages to the model. This is pretty different from the role of the controller in Rails, where it acts as the be-all dispatcher. Also, look at the most direct descendants of Smalltalk's MVC concept: Morphic, which is an unmitigated disaster with no controller at all, and Cocoa, which eventually replaced almost all the controllers with three stock ones. Everybody doing anything like a GUI is using MVC, but almost nobody is doing it like Smalltalk originally did, including Smalltalk today. So, again, you agree with him? MVC has been refined, but it still has a basis in Smalltalk. JVM and V8 owing their performance to Smalltalk hackers just means that dynamic languages get optimized similarly to each other, and the people who did it the first time had the experience to do it again. There's almost nothing of Smalltalk in Javascript. Of course he's referring to Strongtalk, which was the basis for the JVM. Javascript is clearly inspired by Self which is a descendant of Smalltalk. You've got some good points but they'd be easier to take if you weren't being so rude about them. This is the birth of a cult, not an honest appraisal of progress. How is it the birth of a cult when as you've said people are moving on?

fusiongyro 10y ago
I'm angry because the cult-building around Smalltalk is stupid and I fell for it and wasted years trying to see what was there. - It's stupid because you can use Pharo today; Smalltalk isn't dead. Try it and find out if it's great. They're trying as hard as they can to keep it relevant and it's a constant struggle because they have to build from scratch everything Smalltalk didn't invent. - It's stupid because tiny languages like Smalltalk beget huge libraries; I have owned ~20 books on Smalltalk and all but two of them were essentially useless tours of defunct libraries. (The other two are fantastic and useful no matter what language you're using, if it's OOP.) - It's stupid because most of what was powerful about Smalltalk is either nowhere in sight or became mainstream years ago. I'm angry at the cult-building because it builds nostalgia instead of systems. It makes it easy to spurn what we have and make excuses for our own non-productivity—obviously I'd be so much more productive if only it were 1985 and I had Smalltalk! If Smalltalk GUI building is so great, how come nobody uses it today? Because it's maddeningly inferior to everything we have today. Take your "Javascript fatigue" and try out Morphic, tonight. Here's a bottle of Rogaine and vue-cli for when you lose your hair and sanity trying that little experiment. The cult-building is maddening because it misses the truly amazing things. To appreciate the amazing things requires immersion, and immersion sucks! You know, if you make a web app with Seaside and it throws an exception, you can serialize the debug window, bring it down to your image and continue the debugging session locally. The serialization works on blocks, which is to say closures, so you get the whole state of the app locally. Has the OP tried this lately? Because it only works if you use the newest serialization method, if you have exactly the same code in both images, and once you make the change in your local image, how do you get it up to the server again? Oh, you either have to endure the awful homegrown Monticello VCS (inseparable from its insufferable GUI, because Smalltalk) or you have to do the file-out file-in trick with git, because Smalltalk hates external tools. It's a cult because MVC, in the overarching sense that it would have to mean to be applicable to all the aforementioned systems, would have arisen organically without Smalltalk because it's just a sensible design. It's a cult because messaging in the broadest sense that must be meant by including completely different things like Erlang and LINQ predates Smalltalk. If you ascribe things to Smalltalk (or influential people who happened to use Smalltalk) that did not originate in Smalltalk, you are taking Smalltalk as more important than history or fact, and that is the essence of building a cult. Methods-as-messages originate in Smalltalk, sure. If you say Smalltalk invented that, that's true. But of the five things mentioned, only Ruby has that. Java, Javascript, LINQ and Erlang do not. They are not Smalltalk's inheritors; they don't owe their concepts to Smalltalk, even if the same people worked on it. Smalltalk was great, is great. Pharo is great. What makes it a cult is the alpha-and-omega bullshit. Great ideas happened before and after Smalltalk. They chose general names for specific ideas. History is mutilated if we ascribe to Smalltalk the general ideas or give Smalltalk credit for unrelated things because some of the same folks were in the room.