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I think Smalltalk's demise was really from the fact that it was a entire environment that had to live in a virtual machine. Especially in the 70s and 80s, that
by fault1 5y ago
I think Smalltalk's demise was really from the fact that it was a entire environment that had to live in a virtual machine.
Especially in the 70s and 80s, that was a huge performance barrier.
Contrast this with C, which probably won because of its largest benefactor, Bell Labs and UNIX. Smalltalk in some sense was a competitor with UNIX itself.
Smalltalk's influence is everywhere, but the sad thing about it is that it's dev tools were so much ahead of time of anything else.
- agumonkey 5y agoI think none of the reason applies but it's tongue in cheek.. I think it all points at cultural maturity. Same smalltalk today might be well received because machines are wide and fast and people have seen more languages. It's surely easier to show ST to py or js coder today now they've seen large syntax changes and paradigms (FP, async etc)
- 7thaccount 5y agoPharo is a Smalltalk, but they're ok with moving in new directions. As a Python coder, I played with Pharo and tried several tutorials and read a book on Smalltalk-80. I get the gist of things, but have trouble actually writing the code as things aren't obvious and there is no StackOverflow or cookbook for common tasks. It took me forever to figure out how to do file IO and that sort of thing. The other problem is that deployment isn't just running a script, but deploying the image and runtime of some obscure language nobody has ever heard of in enterprise software and no IT department is going to be cool with it.
- igouy 5y agoMaybe IT already deployed https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/successes/financial-services/jpmorgan/ https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/successes/financial-ser...
- 7thaccount 5y agoI think most users of Cincom Smalltalk (and other esoteric language users such as Volvo using Dyalog APL) occurs most often due to historical reasons. Please note that I don't think poorly of these languages and would use them over something like Java in my own pet projects any day.
- igouy 5y ago> historical reasons Of course, mission critical business software still needs to be deployed long after fashions change.
- agumonkey 5y agoenterprise is rarely a good for esoteric stuff anyway i actually meant pharo above, i never used genuine smalltalk, just what the pharo mooc gave us
- protomyth 5y agoThere are Smalltalks that don't live in a VM. I still contend that the Smalltalk vendors overpriced their wares in the era of Turbo Pascal and they all went a bit Java crazy which amounted to nothing. It is a shame that Self and F-Script didn't gain a bit of attention.
- nunb 5y agoA pity about F-Script for sure, if only it had targeted app builders. Smalltalk history seems to be littered with abandoned projects. Amber ST in the browser and F-Script on OSX come foremost to mind.
- ck45 5y agoDon't forget Ambrai Smalltalk which had a really cool beta version but then disappeared. F-Script was really awesome, even more with F-Script Anywhere
- fault1 5y agoSelf was quite influential in the language development world however, perhaps most so in JavaScript itself. StrongTalk was also very influential, because many of its developers also ended up working on core parts of the JVM and V8 JITs both at Sun and Google.
- foobiekr 5y agoQKS was a prime offender complete with asking a completely sincere “wait what happened?” afterwards.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> I think Smalltalk's demise was really from the fact that it was a entire environment that had to live in a virtual machine. Yep, that definitely killed off Javascript.