3 ms·

Would smalltalk been as successful as ruby is now if DHH had written rails in it?

• scroot 6y ago
  It's possible. But the mainstream culture of computing is still so entrenched in the division of user/programmer and in the use of text editing as a primary interface that I suspect it would not have caught on in the same way.
• projektfu 6y ago
  That’s a great question. Seaside was really good at handling application flow through pages, seamlessly allowing the back button to work, by being based on closures and continuations. If that had been paired with the new ideas about convention over configuration and if a good object database were freely available, I think DHH might have chosen it had he been aware. DSL like things and magical code are possible in Smalltalk but the system is more reified in its final view. You could have class methods initializing the relationships, etc, but afterward those methods and variables would be visible parts of the system. Then tearing them down might not be as easy as removing a line of code like it is in a language like Ruby where the state is discarded at the end of a run.