4 ms·

I think we've reached agreement here, and I've calmed down a bit so I can restate things a little more dispassionately and maybe demonstrate that. Fundamentall

I think we've reached agreement here, and I've calmed down a bit so I can restate things a little more dispassionately and maybe demonstrate that. Fundamentally, I think if you're talking about Smalltalk, you're either talking about it in situ, or as it is today, or as an influencer. In the original context, it was thrilling, far ahead of its time in many ways, and lost out because of the reasons you mention: expensive machines, expensive licensing, performance. If you're talking about it as it is today, it's a mixture of great and horrible and if someone is uniformly positive about it that tells me they have limited experience—either with Smalltalk itself or with competing modern systems. As an influencer, there are things that can make a reasonable claim to inherit concepts from Smalltalk, especially Ruby. But the influence is not as wide as gets claimed by its proponents. Some of the ideas in Smalltalk are synergistic and don't work well taken piecemeal. Many of the claims about Smalltalk's influence above are unreasonable, either because they are a semantic ball-and-cup game or because they claim a kind of invisible human influence that bears no technical resemblance. Smalltalk is worth using today, but it has actual faults that shouldn't be whitewashed, and I find the cult of Smalltalk distasteful because it prioritizes in-group mythbuilding over the truth. We should all download Pharo and use it for a few weeks. That direct, personal experimentation is the ultimate cure to technology triumphalism, whether we're talking about Smalltalk or anything else. I certainly agree with you that we can do better than what we have today, and that Smalltalk has lessons for how to do that which would absolutely apply.

nielsabel 10y ago
I think you pretty much nailed it here. > If you're talking about it as it is today, it's a mixture of great and horrible Most PC run Wintel and nowadays even more people use/care about ARM/Android/iOS. That's reality and I don't debate that. I'm only/mostly interested in reserarch/CompSci as a discipline. > But the influence is not as wide as gets claimed by its proponents. To me, the problem always seemed to be less of how wide these ideas spread but how well they and their origins were understood. OOP made a lot more sense to me, when I found out what Alan Kay had in mind (Sketchpad, Arpanet, biology, etc.). > Some of the ideas in Smalltalk are synergistic and don't work well taken piecemeal. Exactly. I think of Smalltalk as more of a system and not just a language. In my opinion, C++, Java, et al. fail (or aren't as good as they could be), because they only take just one idea from Smalltalk (e.g. classes; or the GUI, in case of the Apple Macintosh or Niklaus Wirth's Lilith), when the good things about Smalltalk were due to the interplay of multiple ideas. > Smalltalk is worth using today, but it has actual faults that shouldn't be whitewashed I see Smalltalk (and its usefulness) more as a research system than a production system. I'm mostly interested in research and moving Computer "Science" as a discipline forward. I'm sick of people trying to sell me their 5% performance improvement as "new"/"research". Problem is, things haven't fundamentally changed since 1965 (the von Neumann bottleneck is still present, both physically and mentally). Smalltalk could have been the greatest piece garbage in computing history and I'd still respect it (somewhat), because at least it tried to do things fundamentally different. > I find the cult of Smalltalk distasteful because it prioritizes in-group mythbuilding over the truth. To be honest, you've got that problem everywhere. Heck, look at Apple, Linux, BSD, Unix/Plan9 … Btw: I'm currently reading "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its implementation". What's your opinion on that book? And thanks for the other two book recommendations.
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  Nothing else to comment on but this: > Btw: I'm currently reading "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its implementation". What's your opinion on that book? It's required reading and it will tell you how to build Smalltalk-the-language (inefficiently, but productively), but it won't really teach you how to use Smalltalk today. For your purposes, it's definitely the right book.
  - nielsabel 10y ago
    Thanks. This was a fun discussion.
    - fusiongyro 10y ago
      Glad you had fun. I did too.

nielsabel 10y ago

I think you pretty much nailed it here. > If you're talking about it as it is today, it's a mixture of great and horrible Most PC run Wintel and nowadays even more people use/care about ARM/Android/iOS. That's reality and I don't debate that. I'm only/mostly interested in reserarch/CompSci as a discipline. > But the influence is not as wide as gets claimed by its proponents. To me, the problem always seemed to be less of how wide these ideas spread but how well they and their origins were understood. OOP made a lot more sense to me, when I found out what Alan Kay had in mind (Sketchpad, Arpanet, biology, etc.). > Some of the ideas in Smalltalk are synergistic and don't work well taken piecemeal. Exactly. I think of Smalltalk as more of a system and not just a language. In my opinion, C++, Java, et al. fail (or aren't as good as they could be), because they only take just one idea from Smalltalk (e.g. classes; or the GUI, in case of the Apple Macintosh or Niklaus Wirth's Lilith), when the good things about Smalltalk were due to the interplay of multiple ideas. > Smalltalk is worth using today, but it has actual faults that shouldn't be whitewashed I see Smalltalk (and its usefulness) more as a research system than a production system. I'm mostly interested in research and moving Computer "Science" as a discipline forward. I'm sick of people trying to sell me their 5% performance improvement as "new"/"research". Problem is, things haven't fundamentally changed since 1965 (the von Neumann bottleneck is still present, both physically and mentally). Smalltalk could have been the greatest piece garbage in computing history and I'd still respect it (somewhat), because at least it tried to do things fundamentally different. > I find the cult of Smalltalk distasteful because it prioritizes in-group mythbuilding over the truth. To be honest, you've got that problem everywhere. Heck, look at Apple, Linux, BSD, Unix/Plan9 … Btw: I'm currently reading "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its implementation". What's your opinion on that book? And thanks for the other two book recommendations.

fusiongyro 10y ago
Nothing else to comment on but this: > Btw: I'm currently reading "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its implementation". What's your opinion on that book? It's required reading and it will tell you how to build Smalltalk-the-language (inefficiently, but productively), but it won't really teach you how to use Smalltalk today. For your purposes, it's definitely the right book.
- nielsabel 10y ago
  Thanks. This was a fun discussion.
  - fusiongyro 10y ago
    Glad you had fun. I did too.