3 ms·
Note that his point here is not with the expressive power of Smalltalk, but with the complexity it puts in front of the programmer. Workarounds or the existenc
by chalst 15y ago
Note that his point here is not with the expressive power of Smalltalk, but with the complexity it puts in front of the programmer. Workarounds or the existence of ancient wisdom about why things are the way they are aren't really responding to the point he is making.
I agree that 6 and 9 are very weak points.
bashing functional languages - the rants detract from the seriousness of the good points the author makes, who seems to be pushing a Common Lisp is the true way line. In fact, ideas from pure functional programming could clean up several of his exceptions: in support of this I can point to Peter van Roy's comments on PL design convergence.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1805 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1805
- jhancock 15y agoI should also add that Smalltalk didn't "fail" for its technical faults. It failed (in an oversimplified nutshell) because the companies that owned the Smalltalks had business models of charging per developer seat and their investors would not allow them to "pivot" and drop all that revenue to plug it into a browser for free. Sun could afford to give away Java for free as there was no business model behind what started as a lab experiement. Combine this with "the Internet age is coming" mantra that hit in the mid-90s and you have a perfect storm that put a hold on enterprises moving forward with Smalltalk. The internal priorities of enterprises were either put on hold or changed to address "this new Internet thing".