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Apparently (not an expert) [1] Smalltalk was the leader in basically the Java niche until Java happened, whereupon the proprietary and rather expensive Smalltal

by leoc 8y ago

Apparently (not an expert) [1] Smalltalk was the leader in basically the Java niche until Java happened, whereupon the proprietary and rather expensive Smalltalks were wiped out, since not only was Java free as in beer and reassuring to C++ programmers, it also came in riding a truly preposterous hypewave. (For those who weren't there and haven't heard: it was roughly cover-of-Time-magazine scale. It was visible from space.) Then HotSpot—retrofitted from the Self VM, ironically—gave Java a performance advantage which (iirc) the existing ST VMs couldn't match. And while Smalltalk was almost the paradigm dynamic language, the proprietary STs had no impact in the scripting-language niche thanks to their licensing costs and inward-looking, image-based nature. (GNU Smalltalk was another story: I don't know what happened or failed to happen there.) [1] There was in fact an article written by someone who was an expert which did the rounds of /r/programming back in the day. But good luck finding it now of course.

3rdAccount 8y ago
I think it is called "Why Smalltalk failed" and is easy to find with a search. Java was web, Perl was web, and ST wasn't ready. Java and Perl were free as in beer, ST was expensive. I think ST hardware was expensive too. ST is very different from C & C++. ST had multiple vendors too.
- leoc 8y ago
  "why smalltalk failed" may afaicr have been first thing I tried: https://www.google.com/search?q="Why+Smalltalk+failed" https://www.google.com/search?q="Why+Smalltalk+failed" . https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-failed-to-dominate-the-world-93e7e4195039 https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-failed-to-do... isn't the article I was looking for. It's much more recent, and much less in-depth. However http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsSmalltalkDead http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsSmalltalkDead covers a lot of the same ground, unsurprisingly. I'm pretty sure that late-'80s/early-'90s ST was largely run on commodity (or fairly-commodity) hardware: PCs, Macs, Unix workstations. It was commercial Lisp that tended to be tied to dedicated hardware. IIUC Smalltalk did have a then-expensive appetite for RAM though. The commercial STs of the time weren't good as CGI languages like Perl and PHP for the same reasons they weren't suitable as Perl-style scripting languages in general. Meanwhile, behind the hype it soon turned out that Java applets were not ready for prime time either, while servlets were something that could probably have easily been replicated in ST (and for all I know, likely were).
  - kristianp 8y ago
    googling site:www.reddit.com smalltalk leoc one of the results is: Bambi Meets Godzilla - "I watched Smalltalk die." https://web.archive.org/web/20080706101400/http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/01/bambi_meets_godzilla.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080706101400/http://www.oreill...
pjmlp 8y ago
You missed the part that IBM was a big Smalltalk vendor and they rebooted their product offering into Java, including Eclipse which has its roots on Visual Age for Smalltalk. Eclipse to this day still has a Smalltalk like code browser for Java code. Also in the early days although the JDK was free beer, all good IDEs were commercial, Eclipse and Netbeans only came a few years later.
z3phyr 8y ago
There was also Inferno[1] and Limbo[2] from bell labs touted as the future, some very good ideas.. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)

by leoc 8y ago

3rdAccount 8y ago

I think it is called "Why Smalltalk failed" and is easy to find with a search. Java was web, Perl was web, and ST wasn't ready. Java and Perl were free as in beer, ST was expensive. I think ST hardware was expensive too. ST is very different from C & C++. ST had multiple vendors too.

leoc 8y ago
"why smalltalk failed" may afaicr have been first thing I tried: https://www.google.com/search?q="Why+Smalltalk+failed" https://www.google.com/search?q="Why+Smalltalk+failed" . https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-failed-to-dominate-the-world-93e7e4195039 https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-failed-to-do... isn't the article I was looking for. It's much more recent, and much less in-depth. However http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsSmalltalkDead http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsSmalltalkDead covers a lot of the same ground, unsurprisingly. I'm pretty sure that late-'80s/early-'90s ST was largely run on commodity (or fairly-commodity) hardware: PCs, Macs, Unix workstations. It was commercial Lisp that tended to be tied to dedicated hardware. IIUC Smalltalk did have a then-expensive appetite for RAM though. The commercial STs of the time weren't good as CGI languages like Perl and PHP for the same reasons they weren't suitable as Perl-style scripting languages in general. Meanwhile, behind the hype it soon turned out that Java applets were not ready for prime time either, while servlets were something that could probably have easily been replicated in ST (and for all I know, likely were).
- kristianp 8y ago
  googling site:www.reddit.com smalltalk leoc one of the results is: Bambi Meets Godzilla - "I watched Smalltalk die." https://web.archive.org/web/20080706101400/http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/01/bambi_meets_godzilla.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080706101400/http://www.oreill...

pjmlp 8y ago

You missed the part that IBM was a big Smalltalk vendor and they rebooted their product offering into Java, including Eclipse which has its roots on Visual Age for Smalltalk. Eclipse to this day still has a Smalltalk like code browser for Java code. Also in the early days although the JDK was free beer, all good IDEs were commercial, Eclipse and Netbeans only came a few years later.

z3phyr 8y ago

There was also Inferno[1] and Limbo[2] from bell labs touted as the future, some very good ideas.. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)