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It has nothing to do with philosophical concepts and everything with business culture. There are tools that facilitate expression, innovation and individual co

by dgb23 5y ago

It has nothing to do with philosophical concepts and everything with business culture. There are tools that facilitate expression, innovation and individual contribution. And there are tools that make it easier to scale and for programmers to be interchangeable. These two are very hard to unify. There’s cross pollination but that’s about it. Whether you’re in a top down hierarchical business model or in one that’s more open and people centric has a significant impact on which type of tools you’re using. Smalltalk, Lisp and their descendants belong to the former category. They are immersive, expressive and incredibly dynamic and their communities are often pioneers. But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay.

sebastianconcpt 5y ago
I agree with everything you said except your first sentence :D
kkfx 5y ago
> But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay. Who are those some? Managers or techie? Because yes, business choose to do it's best avoiding Smalltalk, Lisp etc for business reasons, but those reasons are not "their cost" but the fact that with them anything is open, integrated, there are not countless of individual "product" to be sold, well welded so to guarantee that no one can temper them etc. It's a bit like modern "open source enterprise" monsters, they are not monsters because doing so make easy changes people involved in a project, find people skilled in that field etc but because being monsters it's cheap to pay enterprise support instead of deal with issues internally, re-write from scratch instead of forking etc. While these days Smalltalk and Lisp are just programming environments on a host OS in the past they were the OS and so the OS is a unique environment not a container cargo ship with containers on top, anything rigidly separated, that's the business reasons behind industry choice IMO...

by dgb23 5y ago

sebastianconcpt 5y ago

I agree with everything you said except your first sentence :D

kkfx 5y ago

> But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay. Who are those some? Managers or techie? Because yes, business choose to do it's best avoiding Smalltalk, Lisp etc for business reasons, but those reasons are not "their cost" but the fact that with them anything is open, integrated, there are not countless of individual "product" to be sold, well welded so to guarantee that no one can temper them etc. It's a bit like modern "open source enterprise" monsters, they are not monsters because doing so make easy changes people involved in a project, find people skilled in that field etc but because being monsters it's cheap to pay enterprise support instead of deal with issues internally, re-write from scratch instead of forking etc. While these days Smalltalk and Lisp are just programming environments on a host OS in the past they were the OS and so the OS is a unique environment not a container cargo ship with containers on top, anything rigidly separated, that's the business reasons behind industry choice IMO...