4 ms·

It's worth spending a few hours to get an idea of what Smalltalk looks and feels like, but I wouldn't spend any more time than that on it. First of all, it's d

It's worth spending a few hours to get an idea of what Smalltalk looks and feels like, but I wouldn't spend any more time than that on it. First of all, it's dynamically typed, which is not something we should seriously be using in the 21st century. Second, the tool ecosystem surrounding Smalltalk is abysmal and antiquated compared to modern IDE's.

coldtea 10y ago
>First of all, it's dynamically typed, which is not something we should seriously be using in the 21st century. Citation needed. >Second, the tool ecosystem surrounding Smalltalk is abysmal and antiquated compared to modern IDE's. Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995.
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  > Citation needed Math. Look up the Curry Howard isomorphism and why it cannot be leveraged with dynamically typed languages. > Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995 I think you should spend some time with some of these modern IDE's to understand what true, guaranteed correct refactoring means, something Smalltalk can never hope to achieve because the language doesn't have type annotations.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Curious what tools you consider suitable?
    - hota_mazi 10y ago
      IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode.
      - brudgers 10y ago
        Curious about languages as well -- I think of languages as tools, too.
        hota_mazi 10y ago
        That becomes a little bit more subjective so I won't name specific languages, but to me, the language being statically typed is a requirement.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Math. Look up the Curry Howard isomorphism and why it cannot be leveraged with dynamically typed languages. That's not Math. That's using math and then adding hand waving conclusions. Whether a language can leverage the "Curry Howard isomorphism" or not, while verifiable, is a totally different claim than "we should not seriously be using [that language] in the 21st century". >I think you should spend some time with some of these modern IDE's And I think you should know that I have been using those for decades (if by "those" we mean Eclipse, Idea and XCode). Still find Smalltalk IDEs with the whole paradigm more powerful.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > Second, the tool ecosystem surrounding Smalltalk is abysmal and antiquated compared to modern IDE's. > Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995. Perhaps more fairly than either of those characterizations, most modern IDEs are influenced by a different set of priorities than typical Smalltalk dev environments, and have different strengths and weaknesses, and most current developers are (whether this is inherently better or just an adaptation to the tools they use) attached to workflows that major modern IDEs support better than Smalltalk toolsets (OTOH, the exact reverse is probably true of most Smalltalk developers, though they are smaller in number.)
dragonwriter 10y ago
> First of all, it's dynamically typed, which is not something we should seriously be using in the 21st century. While I disagree that the second half is valid as a blanket statement, if that really is a problem for you, there is always Strongtalk.
jhbadger 10y ago
In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. My first serious programming was in Pascal, in the 1980s. You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. My first Pascal was Apple Pascal, which was a UCSD Pascal. In UCSD Pascal everything was compiled to a virtual machine called the p-machine. In the late 1980s we all thought this was a stupid idea and for efficiency we should use native code. But by the late 1990s things went back to the idea of virtual machines, JVM and .NET. Now with Go and Rust we seem to be going back to native code. And with this whole obsession about static typing we are going back to the 1980s too.
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  > In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. I don't think we were. I don't even think we truly understood the practical difference between statically and dynamically typed languages. But even so, back then, it was reasonable to claim that while statically typed languages have the advantage of performance and correctness, they are much more verbose than dynamically typed languages. Today, this is no longer true. We know how to design languages that have the strengths of both statically and dynamically typed languages (see Kotlin and Swift for the best incarnations of these concepts). There is really no good argument in favor of picking a dynamically typed language.
- Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  > You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. Yes, it is all just fashion, and relentless churning.

coldtea 10y ago

>First of all, it's dynamically typed, which is not something we should seriously be using in the 21st century. Citation needed. >Second, the tool ecosystem surrounding Smalltalk is abysmal and antiquated compared to modern IDE's. Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995.

hota_mazi 10y ago
> Citation needed Math. Look up the Curry Howard isomorphism and why it cannot be leveraged with dynamically typed languages. > Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995 I think you should spend some time with some of these modern IDE's to understand what true, guaranteed correct refactoring means, something Smalltalk can never hope to achieve because the language doesn't have type annotations.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Curious what tools you consider suitable?
  - hota_mazi 10y ago
    IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode.
    - brudgers 10y ago
      Curious about languages as well -- I think of languages as tools, too.
      - hota_mazi 10y ago
        That becomes a little bit more subjective so I won't name specific languages, but to me, the language being statically typed is a requirement.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Math. Look up the Curry Howard isomorphism and why it cannot be leveraged with dynamically typed languages. That's not Math. That's using math and then adding hand waving conclusions. Whether a language can leverage the "Curry Howard isomorphism" or not, while verifiable, is a totally different claim than "we should not seriously be using [that language] in the 21st century". >I think you should spend some time with some of these modern IDE's And I think you should know that I have been using those for decades (if by "those" we mean Eclipse, Idea and XCode). Still find Smalltalk IDEs with the whole paradigm more powerful.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> > Second, the tool ecosystem surrounding Smalltalk is abysmal and antiquated compared to modern IDE's. > Actually modern IDE's are abysmal compared to what Smalltalk offered even back in 1995. Perhaps more fairly than either of those characterizations, most modern IDEs are influenced by a different set of priorities than typical Smalltalk dev environments, and have different strengths and weaknesses, and most current developers are (whether this is inherently better or just an adaptation to the tools they use) attached to workflows that major modern IDEs support better than Smalltalk toolsets (OTOH, the exact reverse is probably true of most Smalltalk developers, though they are smaller in number.)

dragonwriter 10y ago

> First of all, it's dynamically typed, which is not something we should seriously be using in the 21st century. While I disagree that the second half is valid as a blanket statement, if that really is a problem for you, there is always Strongtalk.

jhbadger 10y ago

In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. My first serious programming was in Pascal, in the 1980s. You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. My first Pascal was Apple Pascal, which was a UCSD Pascal. In UCSD Pascal everything was compiled to a virtual machine called the p-machine. In the late 1980s we all thought this was a stupid idea and for efficiency we should use native code. But by the late 1990s things went back to the idea of virtual machines, JVM and .NET. Now with Go and Rust we seem to be going back to native code. And with this whole obsession about static typing we are going back to the 1980s too.

hota_mazi 10y ago
> In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. I don't think we were. I don't even think we truly understood the practical difference between statically and dynamically typed languages. But even so, back then, it was reasonable to claim that while statically typed languages have the advantage of performance and correctness, they are much more verbose than dynamically typed languages. Today, this is no longer true. We know how to design languages that have the strengths of both statically and dynamically typed languages (see Kotlin and Swift for the best incarnations of these concepts). There is really no good argument in favor of picking a dynamically typed language.
Safety1stClyde 10y ago
> You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. Yes, it is all just fashion, and relentless churning.