4 ms·
Story time. When I was a young developer in a database company, my cubicle was next to a section where a team sat. The team consisted 30 to 40 people working o
by ww520 3y ago
Story time. When I was a young developer in a database company, my cubicle was next to a section where a team sat. The team consisted 30 to 40 people working on a secret project. Whenever I asked them what they were working on, they said it’s a secret next gen technology. They spoke in secret code and big terms. The only thing I knew was they were using Smalltalk as the language as they weren’t shy in speaking beamingly about it. They work on these powerful workstations with large monitors, a luxury at the time, as the Smalltalk dev studio required them. I thought these were god developers, working with advanced technologies in a covet skunk project.
The project went on for couple years. Nobody knew what they were doing, not their goals, their product plan, their features, nor their designs. The only thing we knew was they were using Smalltalk.
The high-up forced them to give a demo eventually. The talk was good, on Smalltalk, on OO, and on the landscape of the technologies. When the demo started, it showed a half finished login dialog box but nothing else. They said something about unable to package the code and do a release. Understandably software releases were a big bang process back then. But what about prior releases? Nothing. They didn’t have any finished builds. The talk continued.
The project got canceled couple months later.
- pavlov 3y agoSmalltalk was always good for rapidly developing GUIs, so whatever the reason was that they only had a half-finished login box to demo, it probably wasn’t Smalltalk’s fault. Rapid development tools can’t help you if you don’t know what to build.
- ww520 3y agoMy guess is the secrecy of the project was the main contributing factor to its failure. There were no vetting on the products, feature, design, development process, technologies, language choice, etc. Too many people read Skunk Works and thought they were Lockheed Martin. The language choice probably contributed somewhat. Smalltalk used to have problems with source version control and configuration management. It's difficult for multiple people to work on the same codebase. Merging change was difficult as the individual development environments were modified. The rapid prototyping was probably a false lead as it lured decision makers into thinking lower development cost. By and large when the only thing about the project you can talk about is the language used, it is probably doomed to fail.
- guestbest 3y agoI hope it was a beautifully designed login screen at least
- znpy 3y agoI have dabbled with Pharo smalltalk a bit and got a similar feeling. The core "thing" (pharo it self) works well enough, other stuff you'll likely have to write on your own (batteries are not included). Also, multi-threading seems to be non-existant? No FOSS implementation does that AFAIK (proprietary implementations are irrelevant). I see the nicety of the language, but I'm not convinced (at all) by the implementation. Oh and Pharo seems to be the most advanced implementation of Smalltalk? It really doesn't look practical at all. But then again, the video starts and the guy is kinda deriding some Java or C++ code but then you move forward (eg: 8:31) and the speaker has a whole display filled with unrelated things and has to write code in a small text area, viewing like 4 lines at the time? Thanks, i'll pass...
- smackeyacky 3y agoGenerally if your method in Smalltalk is 4 lines you're doing something wrong. Most good Smalltalk ends up being only 1 or 2 lines at the most, which is why the "coding" window always looked weird and small compared to contemporary languages.
- znpy 3y agoI’ll be honest this looks like an arbitrarily made up rule and stinks like bs.
- smackeyacky 3y agoAnd this moment is why smalltalk is not for everybody
- igouy 3y agoYour "has to write code in a small text area, viewing like 4 lines at the time" is a silly exaggeration. The text area is likely resizable and scrollable. Their "if your method in Smalltalk is 4 lines you're doing something wrong" is a silly exaggeration. 'Smalltalk "programs" are ensembles of objects, distributed throughout the class hierarchy, that work together by means of message passing produce computations.' Individual methods tend to be small and without a single large program text beginners had problems finding "the program".
- gcanyon 3y agoWas the project called Jabberwocky by any chance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas
- ww520 3y agoYou know what's funny. In one of the startups, we did bring in a TV crew to shoot commercials on us working. The commercials were aired before the product was half way ready. In one of the product demos in a trade show, the CEO was clicking on the software and I was sitting behind the stage inserting rows into the database on cue to create the illusion that the product was working since it was way before alpha.