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Its incredible to me that the guys who lament the fall of Smalltalk always blame Java. It wasn't Java that killed Smalltalk, it was a combination of ParcPlace'

Its incredible to me that the guys who lament the fall of Smalltalk always blame Java. It wasn't Java that killed Smalltalk, it was a combination of ParcPlace's hubris and Visual Basic. In the end, replacing those "green screen" CRUD apps was much easier in Visual Basic. For starters you could collaborate much easier with VB and visual source safe instead of spending thousands of dollars a seat on Envy/developer. Second, the guys at ParcPlace simply didn't understand how quickly the pentium PC would decimate the workstation market of Sun etc in financial institutions and how good VB got in a very short space of time. Yet here we are with another article blaming Java. An easy and lazy target to cover up for that elitism that pervaded the Smalltalk community back then and still does today.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Object-orientation became mainstream in many ways. There was Visual Basic and Microsoft's COM. (e.g. when Microsoft adds a new API to Windows it adds a COM interface.) Everything from TCL, Perl, Python not to mention LISP and Forth added ways to write object-based if not object-oriented code. Smalltalk won the battle for ideas even though the exact syntax and runtime didn't win.
- worik 5y ago
  But it was a bad idea. Elements of it left now, but the very bad bits (like derivation hiding implementation Dog knkows where) have thankfully gone extinct
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's reached the "Plateau of Productivity" Ideas from functional programming languages are now becoming mainstream. I like it how pattern matching turned up in both Java and Python at the same time. If people quit hating on Java for a moment they'd see it was getting "ML the good parts." Once people get past "A monad is like a burrito" and "this is the 20th blog post I've written about monads and I almost understand it now" that idea might get some traction too.
cabalamat 5y ago
> instead of spending thousands of dollars a seat on Envy/developer. It wasn't the cost of Smalltalk that was the problem, as there were low-cost implementations of Smalltalk, such as Smalltalk/V available on PC from the mid 80s onwards.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  No but the only credible source control tool for VisualWorks was envy/developer. Otherwise you were filing in and out classes and trying to share your changes. It was a disaster.
  - igouy 5y ago
    From the blog post — 'Digitalk’s Team/V unobtrusively introduced a non-reflective syntax and versioned source code using RCS. Team/V could forward and backwards migrate versions of Smalltalk “modules” within an running virtual image.'
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > It wasn't the cost of Smalltalk that was the problem, as there were low-cost implementations of Smalltalk Low-cost for large companies, but prohibitive for small companies/home use? > such as Smalltalk/V available on PC from the mid 80s onwards. Anybody use it? Any good?
- aardvark179 5y ago
  Licensing costs were most definitely an issue. The Smallworld GIS system was written using a home grown language and VM because that was more economical than issuing every user with a suitable Smalltalk licence (because in the early days every user was expected to potentially be writing code to analyse their data).
  - igouy 5y ago
    Would it have made any sense for a software tool vendor to let someone buy one license and then redistribute the software tool to their customers? Magik https://sworldwatch.blogspot.com/2011/08/smallworld-technical-paper-no-5.html https://sworldwatch.blogspot.com/2011/08/smallworld-technica...
pjmlp 5y ago
It was certainly Java, as many early adopters were former Smalltalk vendors, e.g. IBM.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Thats not my recollection of the era. VB was was widely scorned but it was incredibly productive. At my workplace at the time, when smalltalk collapsed as a viable dev environment, it was largely replaced with VB pointing at the sybase databases we had. The smalltalkers scoffed, but the speed the VB guys got things done killed everything else. I ended up moving to a team that built a distributed trading system on DCOM, c++ and VB and while the tech wasn't lovable, it sure worked better than corba and java. Its easy to forget what a monster VB was. Java took forever to mature in comparison. That websphere nonsense was a huge distraction for people who just wanted a crud app.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    As one of the original developers of VB, what you wrote here really touched me. What you're describing was exactly what we hoped to facilitate.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    Your counterargument applies to your work place only though, do you know of other companies that did the same?
    - matwood 5y ago
      I can't speak to smalltalk, but I can for Java vs. VB. VB was big in Microsoft shops. Java wasn't anywhere close to as easy or viable for desktop CRUD apps then (could be argued if ever). Language aside, I could argue that VB6 was the closest the industry has gotten to low/no code for complex CRUD apps.
      - baq 5y ago
        > Language aside, I could argue that VB6 was the closest the industry has gotten to low/no code for complex CRUD apps. cries in Delphi tears
zzzeek 5y ago
only an anecodote for me but I was on a team in 1997 or so where we exactly were brought in to a financial client to write for them a "thin client" in Java, explicitly using the fact that Java was so strongly hyped that it would allow the team that was hiring us to poke a hole in their existing VB codebase and break up some of the calcification in their technology organization. In the early meetings we were pitted directly against a tech manager there who was very strongly advocating for Smalltalk; we as an outside vendor were allowed to win that argument that Java / "thin client" etc. were all the way, literally verbatim to the article's paragraph: > The World Wide Web diverted enterprise attention away from fat clients and suddenly web thin clients were the hot new technology. At the same time Sun Microsystems’ massive marketing campaign for Java convinced enterprises that Java was the future for both web and standalone client applications. my anecodote continued to match what this article says: > Even though Java never delivered on its client-side promises you can say that again, within one dev cycle the original idea of delivering a web-based servlet was gone, as there was no support for any local machine / file / upload / etc access, we then delivered a fat java client where I ended up having to write basically all of Swing UX which hadn't quite been invented yet as the native checkboxes/ textareas / etc all performed like crap on the little 486/pentium machines we were deploying towards.
- gojomo 5y ago
  Many such cases. The download & run experience for Java/JRE fat client apps was also awful for so long, at least for mass consumer end users. (Captive corporate userbases could be shepherded through the steps.)
igouy 5y ago
> another article blaming Java No, the article blames - hardware requirements, - problems with application deployment, - technology choices by large companies, - the demanding and fickle green screen to fat client niche, - Smalltalk vendor blindness to the emergence of web browser as a business platform, - AND Java marketing.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Object-orientation became mainstream in many ways. There was Visual Basic and Microsoft's COM. (e.g. when Microsoft adds a new API to Windows it adds a COM interface.) Everything from TCL, Perl, Python not to mention LISP and Forth added ways to write object-based if not object-oriented code. Smalltalk won the battle for ideas even though the exact syntax and runtime didn't win.

worik 5y ago
But it was a bad idea. Elements of it left now, but the very bad bits (like derivation hiding implementation Dog knkows where) have thankfully gone extinct
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's reached the "Plateau of Productivity" Ideas from functional programming languages are now becoming mainstream. I like it how pattern matching turned up in both Java and Python at the same time. If people quit hating on Java for a moment they'd see it was getting "ML the good parts." Once people get past "A monad is like a burrito" and "this is the 20th blog post I've written about monads and I almost understand it now" that idea might get some traction too.

cabalamat 5y ago

> instead of spending thousands of dollars a seat on Envy/developer. It wasn't the cost of Smalltalk that was the problem, as there were low-cost implementations of Smalltalk, such as Smalltalk/V available on PC from the mid 80s onwards.

smackeyacky 5y ago
No but the only credible source control tool for VisualWorks was envy/developer. Otherwise you were filing in and out classes and trying to share your changes. It was a disaster.
- igouy 5y ago
  From the blog post — 'Digitalk’s Team/V unobtrusively introduced a non-reflective syntax and versioned source code using RCS. Team/V could forward and backwards migrate versions of Smalltalk “modules” within an running virtual image.'
redis_mlc 5y ago
> It wasn't the cost of Smalltalk that was the problem, as there were low-cost implementations of Smalltalk Low-cost for large companies, but prohibitive for small companies/home use? > such as Smalltalk/V available on PC from the mid 80s onwards. Anybody use it? Any good?
aardvark179 5y ago
Licensing costs were most definitely an issue. The Smallworld GIS system was written using a home grown language and VM because that was more economical than issuing every user with a suitable Smalltalk licence (because in the early days every user was expected to potentially be writing code to analyse their data).
- igouy 5y ago
  Would it have made any sense for a software tool vendor to let someone buy one license and then redistribute the software tool to their customers? Magik https://sworldwatch.blogspot.com/2011/08/smallworld-technical-paper-no-5.html https://sworldwatch.blogspot.com/2011/08/smallworld-technica...

pjmlp 5y ago

It was certainly Java, as many early adopters were former Smalltalk vendors, e.g. IBM.

smackeyacky 5y ago
Thats not my recollection of the era. VB was was widely scorned but it was incredibly productive. At my workplace at the time, when smalltalk collapsed as a viable dev environment, it was largely replaced with VB pointing at the sybase databases we had. The smalltalkers scoffed, but the speed the VB guys got things done killed everything else. I ended up moving to a team that built a distributed trading system on DCOM, c++ and VB and while the tech wasn't lovable, it sure worked better than corba and java. Its easy to forget what a monster VB was. Java took forever to mature in comparison. That websphere nonsense was a huge distraction for people who just wanted a crud app.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  As one of the original developers of VB, what you wrote here really touched me. What you're describing was exactly what we hoped to facilitate.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Your counterargument applies to your work place only though, do you know of other companies that did the same?
  - matwood 5y ago
    I can't speak to smalltalk, but I can for Java vs. VB. VB was big in Microsoft shops. Java wasn't anywhere close to as easy or viable for desktop CRUD apps then (could be argued if ever). Language aside, I could argue that VB6 was the closest the industry has gotten to low/no code for complex CRUD apps.
    - baq 5y ago
      > Language aside, I could argue that VB6 was the closest the industry has gotten to low/no code for complex CRUD apps. cries in Delphi tears

zzzeek 5y ago

only an anecodote for me but I was on a team in 1997 or so where we exactly were brought in to a financial client to write for them a "thin client" in Java, explicitly using the fact that Java was so strongly hyped that it would allow the team that was hiring us to poke a hole in their existing VB codebase and break up some of the calcification in their technology organization. In the early meetings we were pitted directly against a tech manager there who was very strongly advocating for Smalltalk; we as an outside vendor were allowed to win that argument that Java / "thin client" etc. were all the way, literally verbatim to the article's paragraph: > The World Wide Web diverted enterprise attention away from fat clients and suddenly web thin clients were the hot new technology. At the same time Sun Microsystems’ massive marketing campaign for Java convinced enterprises that Java was the future for both web and standalone client applications. my anecodote continued to match what this article says: > Even though Java never delivered on its client-side promises you can say that again, within one dev cycle the original idea of delivering a web-based servlet was gone, as there was no support for any local machine / file / upload / etc access, we then delivered a fat java client where I ended up having to write basically all of Swing UX which hadn't quite been invented yet as the native checkboxes/ textareas / etc all performed like crap on the little 486/pentium machines we were deploying towards.

gojomo 5y ago
Many such cases. The download & run experience for Java/JRE fat client apps was also awful for so long, at least for mass consumer end users. (Captive corporate userbases could be shepherded through the steps.)

igouy 5y ago

> another article blaming Java No, the article blames - hardware requirements, - problems with application deployment, - technology choices by large companies, - the demanding and fickle green screen to fat client niche, - Smalltalk vendor blindness to the emergence of web browser as a business platform, - AND Java marketing.