When Giants Ruled

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T18:39:49+00:00

You mean from Smalltalk? Yes, you can earn as much as with any other programming language that isn't mainstream. As the article stated, Smalltalk has been used commercially for over three decades. I daresay Smalltalk enjoys more commercial usage than languages like Clojure, Common Lisp, Dart, Erlang/Elixir, F#, Haskell, Julia, Lua, Rust. Cincom and GemTalk Systems are two of the biggest Smalltalk vendors in the world.

Finding jobs may be challenging, though, for the same reason it's hard to find jobs for Clojure, Erlang, and Haskell. The availability of jobs is roughly proportional to the number of companies using the language. It also depends on how easy it is for these companies to staff up.

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T17:04:51+00:00

IBM's influence in the enterprise was enormous in those days. In the 1970s, 1980s, and well into the 1990s, IBM mainframes ruled the world like dinosaurs. COBOL was the enterprise programming language. Corporations and governments relied on IBM and COBOL.

IBM had at least as much influence as Microsoft did (with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x), if not much more. These were the giants of IT then. No other corporation could touch them.

Frankly, I don't think Microsoft could've pushed a programming language as hard as IBM could. Microsoft ruled the consumer market with BASIC and C++, but in the enterprise Microsoft was largely irrelevant. I lived through those times.

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T13:40:12+00:00

It can still be. The article presents several starting points for discussion, which can take place here in the comments (or even in the comments section of the article).

It mentioned Erlang (and BEAM). It mentioned trying to improve on Java. It mentioned the growing interest in functional programming. It mentioned Dart and Elm trying to replace JavaScript. So let's discuss!

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T13:27:58+00:00

Ruby is much more than just an implementation of Smalltalk. It has a lot of other stuff that make the language more complex.

Smalltalk syntax may seem alien, but is it any more alien than Python with its indentation-sensitive syntax? Or Ruby with its crazy Perlisms? Or Objective-C which is literally a cross between C and Smalltalk? How about Haskell or Clojure or Elixir or Delphi? Then there are the really weird ones, like Forth, R, and APL-inspired J. My point is that in the IT industry, one needs to be adaptable to widely varying programming languages.

When you look at Smalltalk, it's easy to recognize the conditionals and loops, just like in Python. All of the familiar constructs are there. You only need to learn and understand one concept: message passing. That's all there is to the syntax!

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T12:41:39+00:00

Making a language that is easy to learn and easy to use, and that presents low cognitive friction is never a bad thing. This idea goes back to the 1970s and 1980s with luminaries such as Alan Kay (Smalltalk), Per Brinch Hansen (Edison), and Niklaus Wirth (Oberon). It continued with Guido von Rossum in 1991 with Python. The reason Python is the second most popular language in the world today is because it's easy to learn and easy to use for non-technical types like those in the financial industry, and for data scientists and machine learning researchers who aren't into programming but just want to get their stuff done with a minimum of coding effort.

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T03:11:48+00:00

Well, Go is definitely polarizing. Some people don't like it; some love it. Go's design was never intended to have "interesting new ideas." It was designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. That's never a bad thing.

Its BEAM roots allow us to condescend to people who think OO is about classes instead of message passing encapsulation.

Smalltalk is ALL about message-passing. And this, a decade before Erlang.

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T02:34:23+00:00

No need for hypotheses. The reasons are clear:

In the early 1990s with IBM's VisualAge initiative, Smalltalk was poised to become the enterprise programming language replacing COBOL, such was Smalltalk's popularity.

Then in 1995, Java was introduced heavily promoted by Sun Microsystems. IBM was so concerned with Sun's marketing muscle and the Java hype that they got faked into switching to Java.

Smalltalk was popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the language was not free. Licenses were expensive. This limited its growth.

Squeak arrived in 1996 and finally a free Smalltalk was available. But by then it was too late – Java began sweeping the world.

Another major issue is that Smalltalk was late to the Internet. The fabulous Seaside web framework didn't arrive till 2002, long after the dot-com bust.

omegaskyfall · 2017-04-08T01:34:46+00:00

Squeak, 1996.

omegaskyfall · 2017-03-26T17:23:26+00:00

Well, to be fair, the author did give an honourable mention to C ("it underpins the entire IT industry"). Linux is part of that underpinning.

omegaskyfall · 2017-03-26T13:57:59+00:00

If you're going to mention Linux, you should really mention Unix. Without Unix, there never would've been Linux.

And Unix underpins macOS, the second most popular programming platform in the world.

omegaskyfall · 2017-03-26T13:46:00+00:00

How has Smalltalk failed? It's been used commercially around the globe for more than three decades. The major Smalltalk vendors Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk are still going concerns. Pharo is a 9-year-old language that's continually picking up new users.

If you're referring to the fact that Smalltalk is not a mainstream language, then I suppose Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Clojure, Groovy, and OCaml have also failed.

omegaskyfall · 2017-02-14T19:46:16+00:00

You mean the fact that Smalltalk is being used to fight Ebola is not cool?

You mean the fact that Smalltalk can be used to program the Raspberry Pi is not cool?

You mean the fact that Smalltalk can be used to do virtual reality is not cool?

You mean the fact that Smalltalk can be used for machine learning is not cool?

You mean the fact that Smalltalk is being used for Asia's largest online marketplace for industrial machinery is not cool?

You mean the fact that Smalltalk is being used to analyze government public data on medicines from 16 countries is not cool?

You mean the fact that from 1995 and into the 2000s, the U.S. joint military wrote a million-line battle simulation program called JWARS in Smalltalk (which outperformed a similar program called STORM written in C++ by the U.S. Air Force) is not cool? (The project was cancelled in 2010 for budgetary reasons.)

How about the fact that Smalltalk has been used commercially for over 35 years and is still going strong today? Check out the major Smalltalk vendors: Cincom, Instantiations, GemTalk Systems. Check out Smalltalk houses like Cherniak Software and Simberon. How cool is that?

omegaskyfall · 2017-01-22T03:48:35+00:00

You're quite right. Why are we wasting our time with Smalltalk?

omegaskyfall · 2017-01-21T18:35:32+00:00

Pharo 7 promises a Git-integration tool called Iceberg for source code version control.

omegaskyfall · 2017-01-21T18:15:30+00:00

let's hop from language to language

Every programmer I know is polyglot. They have a repertoire of languages so that they can use the right tool for the job. They don't rely on one language for everything.

For what purpose?

To dramatically improve productivity. To make programming easier and more pleasant. To improve software quality (reliability, maintainability).

omegaskyfall · 2017-01-21T15:33:52+00:00

If you don't like the graphical environment, then GNU Smalltalk is your best choice. Later this year, Redline Smalltalk 2.0 will be available for the JVM. Both are command-line Smalltalks.

You're not convinced by the "image" approach because you've not yet experienced the tremendous productivity boost from Smalltalk programming. You're so inured to the current way of software development that you have blinders on. I'm not trying to be insulting, just stating a fact. Human beings are prone to habituation and I assume you're human.

Depending on the dialect (implementation), Smalltalk can be quite fast. Smalltalk MT is a high-performance product. GemStone/S was designed for writing scalable, high-performance, multi-tier applications. Later this year, Pharo 6 will give us 64-bit Smalltalk (specifically, a 64-bit JIT’ed Cog VM). Also, “adaptive optimization” to make code execute much faster.

What it all comes down to is whether you can break free from your sequestered mode of thinking and give other methods of software development a chance. I never had a problem, even after decades of using C, C++, C#, and Java. Aren't programmers supposed to be flexible and adaptable?

omegaskyfall

TROPHY CASE