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For me there was a huge divide between those who were supplying Smalltalk and worked that side of the fence, and the customers who were trying to solve problems
by smackeyacky 4y ago
For me there was a huge divide between those who were supplying Smalltalk and worked that side of the fence, and the customers who were trying to solve problems. I saw that as why Smalltalk lost to simpler/arguably stupider tech like Java.
I have sometimes pondered whether to try making a system that kind of rhymed with Smalltalk, but using Roslyn[0] instead. Although I envisage it as being a kind of playground where you code like Smalltalk, with the artifacts being produced as conventional class files and whatnot so the final build could be done with the normal command line tools.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
- travisgriggs 4y ago> For me there was a huge divide between those who were supplying Smalltalk and worked that side of the fence, and the customers who were trying to solve problems. I saw that as why Smalltalk lost to simpler/arguably stupider tech like Java. Possibly. I did the customer side for 15 years at two different companies, and then Cincom (nee ParcPlace). Smalltalk WAS/IS "weird" (er, "pink plane" paradigm shifty, etc) to begin with. The fact that the total staffs at ParcPlace, IBM Smalltalk team, and Digitalk was smaller than the marketing team alone that Sun allocated for Java, and the insane amount of money spent bootstrapping college kids into training, I'm not sure how the "divide" would mark Smalltalk as different than the other offerings at the time. Sun just did it on a scale easily 2 orders of magnitude greater than Smalltalk.
- goatlover 4y agoJava also had the advantage of being marketed to the large pool of C++ programmers while riding the rising popularity of the web. There was heavy emphasis on applets and networking. Meanwhile, Smalltalk was a bit early to the windowing/pc revolution, OOP and VMs.