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Similar forces hampered the adoption of Smalltalk in the 90s as well [0]. Charging per-seat licenses to use programming languages almost never works, introducin

Similar forces hampered the adoption of Smalltalk in the 90s as well [0]. Charging per-seat licenses to use programming languages almost never works, introducing friction that counters needed network effects, especially when prospective users can download a perfectly viable (if not much worse) alternative for free. Sure, there are a few systems bitterly hanging on to this business model - Lispworks, Cincom, Mathematica - but it's clear they are surviving in spite of it. 0. https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-of-advice.html https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-o...

lispm 4y ago
Again the same: now there are good free Smalltalk implementations, and their adoption is not great. There are also other factors than price.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Scratch 1.x and 2.x were written in Smalltalk, FWIW. But IMHO the "your whole dev environment is your shipped application" is too unappealing to catch on.
  - lispm 4y ago
    On the Lisp side this is an extra step and a source of problems. Traditionally the commercial Lisps REQUIRE one to ship an application without the full dev environment. So there is always a delivery step which generates an application or a shared library. Some other Lisp applications require a delivery Lisp compiler, usually to C because of some other limitations: space, memory management or the platform does not allow a full dev Lisp. Example: there is a process control engine written in Lisp, which is used in industrial control applications. This Lisp application is largish and gets compiled to C and runs without garbage collection.
pjmlp 4y ago
As I wrote in another thread, IBM abandoning Smalltalk for Java was the biggest blow, in a way Smalltalk was IBM's .NET to put in more modern terms, used for their IDEs (Visual Age), OS/2 RAD development and 4GL like language across all their enterprise offerings. Until the day Java came, and they pivoted everything into Java.

lispm 4y ago

Again the same: now there are good free Smalltalk implementations, and their adoption is not great. There are also other factors than price.

dleslie 4y ago
Scratch 1.x and 2.x were written in Smalltalk, FWIW. But IMHO the "your whole dev environment is your shipped application" is too unappealing to catch on.
- lispm 4y ago
  On the Lisp side this is an extra step and a source of problems. Traditionally the commercial Lisps REQUIRE one to ship an application without the full dev environment. So there is always a delivery step which generates an application or a shared library. Some other Lisp applications require a delivery Lisp compiler, usually to C because of some other limitations: space, memory management or the platform does not allow a full dev Lisp. Example: there is a process control engine written in Lisp, which is used in industrial control applications. This Lisp application is largish and gets compiled to C and runs without garbage collection.

pjmlp 4y ago

As I wrote in another thread, IBM abandoning Smalltalk for Java was the biggest blow, in a way Smalltalk was IBM's .NET to put in more modern terms, used for their IDEs (Visual Age), OS/2 RAD development and 4GL like language across all their enterprise offerings. Until the day Java came, and they pivoted everything into Java.