8 ms·
At Yesplan [1] we use GemStone in production, we use Pharo for development. The languages are quite alike, but we do need to have a compatibility layer between
by melvinroest 4y ago
At Yesplan [1] we use GemStone in production, we use Pharo for development. The languages are quite alike, but we do need to have a compatibility layer between the two. For example, GemStone doesn't have dynamic arrays (arrays that evaluate expressions of each element).
Our CTO knows companies that use Pharo in production. I'm sure there are also people using VisualWorks in production. All of these languages are Smalltalk descendants.
[1] http://yesplan.be http://yesplan.be
- rbanffy 4y agoWould you say Smalltalk is a competitive advantage?
- melvinroest 4y agoNot for hiring. In terms of programming, in terms of programmer motivation yes. Not sure in terms of actual effectiveness.
- rbanffy 4y agoWhen you hire someone with experience in an esoteric or obscure language, there is a reasonable chance the person really likes learning esoteric or obscure languages. This is usually a plus.
- 0x445442 4y agoYeah, I’ve programmed (not professionally) quite a bit in the various free Smalltalks and from a purely development perspective I could easily see it as a competitive advantage. The big question I would have is performance of the VMs and images under load but I guess that would fall under premature optimization. I imagine horizontal scaling or transitioning to Gemstone when needed would be the answer.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoThe productivity that a handful of good smalltalkers can achieve to solve complex systems is off the charts. The strongest thing that Smalltalk has is that you'll feel really powerful to deal with changes in the rules of scenarios that are high in complexity. So speed in adapting to change fast is what I see as its most valuable trait.
- hota_mazi 4y ago> The productivity that a handful of good smalltalkers can achieve to solve complex systems is off the charts. You could say that of any experts in any system. They will be extremely productive. There is really nothing special about Smalltalk that makes its developers automatically more productive (especially not the IDE, which is vastly outclassed today by the likes of IDEA, XCode, and Visual Studio).
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoSounds you're asking for an old-school good team competition.
- pjmlp 4y agoIf only the likes of IDEA, XCode, and Visual Studio were able to do hot-reload and REPL based development like Smalltalk was doing in the mid-80's. But no, the occasional oops need to rebuild the world, still happens.
- Rochus 4y agoDepending what you (incidentally) change in Smalltalk you also have to recompile all methods.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoBeing fair, that's not a typical need with code at application level.
- pjmlp 4y agoIndeed, however that is transparent to the user, the current IDE experience would be similar to getting out of Smalltalk and restarting it from scratch.
- hota_mazi 4y agoThese IDE's have been able to do this for 20+ years. And they also do so much more than the rrb.