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Boomers still talking about Smalltalk yet we have an explosion in new programming languages and no one has brought it back to life. You have your pick of mature

Boomers still talking about Smalltalk yet we have an explosion in new programming languages and no one has brought it back to life. You have your pick of mature VM’s. The most popular VM (by installs) even has a popular and extensible transpilation library. The opportunity is there Boomers, build Woodstock again. So if Smalltalk was so great where is babel-plugin-smalltalk or smalltalk-jvm? Frankly I’m not even going to google and see if they exist. The point is I don’t know of them and no one I know is using them.

non-entity 7y ago
Not quite sure what the point of this comment was. Smalltalk may not see much commerical usage (I'm fact I've read some interesting articles as to why that never happened) but many of its foundations exist in modern programming languages today.
naavis 7y ago
I'm sure there are many interesting and useful things in the world you have not heard of and no one you know uses.
cylon13 7y ago
And Seinfeld is unfunny because the jokes are all overdone. > It wasn't old or overdone when they did it, because they were the first ones to do it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn... Smalltalk is woven in to the fabric of every modern object-oriented programming language.
igouy 7y ago
Do you have any example of a programming language that has been "brought back to life" ?
dang 7y ago
Combining programming language flamewar with generational flamewar is the weirdest thing I've seen in a while. We ban accounts that post like this, for obvious reasons. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here?
detaro 7y ago
The vast majority of people I know working with Smalltalk is younger than "boomers". The non-academic half of them is just getting on with using it instead of trying to preach about it.
bitwize 7y ago
Banks and other major companies use Smalltalk as a "secret weapon". I put it on my résumé as a skill (mainly because I was arsing about with Squeak in the early 2000s), and recruiters kept calling me about it. Even though it's not publicly acknowledged that these companies are using it.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Can you tell me more about this? Are you saying that banks and other major companies have "secret" ish projects in small talk that give them a competitive advantage somehow? What are they used for? high speed trading maybe? I've worked with a lot of banks and only ever see Java and Python (mostly Java tho). For high speed trading systems I've usually heard of C/C++
- bernawil 7y ago
  If by secret weapon you mean a thing they used to make an irrelevant back office crud app in the 80s and now they occasionally contract maintenance work from some body shop that pays minimum wage, then sure.
jonjacky 7y ago
Kay himself says here: "Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk ..." (quoted by ssivark in the long excerpt above)

non-entity 7y ago

Not quite sure what the point of this comment was. Smalltalk may not see much commerical usage (I'm fact I've read some interesting articles as to why that never happened) but many of its foundations exist in modern programming languages today.

naavis 7y ago

I'm sure there are many interesting and useful things in the world you have not heard of and no one you know uses.

cylon13 7y ago

And Seinfeld is unfunny because the jokes are all overdone. > It wasn't old or overdone when they did it, because they were the first ones to do it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn... Smalltalk is woven in to the fabric of every modern object-oriented programming language.

igouy 7y ago

Do you have any example of a programming language that has been "brought back to life" ?

dang 7y ago

Combining programming language flamewar with generational flamewar is the weirdest thing I've seen in a while. We ban accounts that post like this, for obvious reasons. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here?

detaro 7y ago

The vast majority of people I know working with Smalltalk is younger than "boomers". The non-academic half of them is just getting on with using it instead of trying to preach about it.

bitwize 7y ago

Banks and other major companies use Smalltalk as a "secret weapon". I put it on my résumé as a skill (mainly because I was arsing about with Squeak in the early 2000s), and recruiters kept calling me about it. Even though it's not publicly acknowledged that these companies are using it.

freedomben 7y ago
Can you tell me more about this? Are you saying that banks and other major companies have "secret" ish projects in small talk that give them a competitive advantage somehow? What are they used for? high speed trading maybe? I've worked with a lot of banks and only ever see Java and Python (mostly Java tho). For high speed trading systems I've usually heard of C/C++
bernawil 7y ago
If by secret weapon you mean a thing they used to make an irrelevant back office crud app in the 80s and now they occasionally contract maintenance work from some body shop that pays minimum wage, then sure.

jonjacky 7y ago

Kay himself says here: "Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk ..." (quoted by ssivark in the long excerpt above)