Re: Digest for amber-lang@googlegroups.com - 11 updates in 1 topic

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Re: Digest for amber-lang@googlegroups.com - 11 updates in 1 topic

peter.ode
Serious projects in Smalltalk have been developed and successfully deployed in banks, Wall Street, insurance companies and many, many more domains. Such serious, industrial strength systems have been mostly programmed in VisualWorks Smalltalk and IBM Visual Age Smalltalk (now Instantiations' VA Smalltalk). Both of these are alive, evolving and doing well.

I've always considered Squeak and Pharo to be lesser Smalltalks for business purposes. Although, Pharo is evolving nicely.

The biggest single issue I have with Smalltalk is it's lack of a true multi-cpu capable VM.  Today's multi-CPU, multi-core and multi-threading capable servers must be leveraged by Smalltalk, if it is ever to grow on the server-side.  My biggest hope, so far, is that EssenceSharp (https://essencesharp.wordpress.com/ ) evolves.  It is the only Smalltalk, besides Gemstone, that can utilize multiple CPUs.  It runs Smalltalk  code on top of Microsoft's .NET, but currently lacks all the Smalltalk IDE tools we love.  Develop on VisualWorks or Pharo, then migrate your code to EssenceSharp on top of .NET. Migration utilities are provided.  If EssenceSharp was evolved, it would be a killer development environment, especially now that Microsoft has open-sourced .NET and is porting it to OS/X and Linux.  Gemstone has potential, but their license costs are far to expensive so hinders it's deployment for larger scale projects.  EssenseSharp would be more accepted by IT departments and uses much less RAM and CPU resources. 

As I've sold custom development projects over the last two decades+, I've found that IT departments want to use technology that's buzz-word compliant. Today, they want "Java" or ".NET" for their platform.  EssenceSharp solves this issue for Smalltalk, as it plays nice with .NET.  

I would love to start/lead/participate with a rally of Smalltalkers wanting to evolve EssenceSharp for server-side development and use Amber for the client-side Smalltalk. Anyone interested?


...
Peter Odehnal
778 338-4800


On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:00 AM, <[hidden email]> wrote:
Richard Eng <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 05:12AM -0700

https://medium.com/@richardeng/why-aren-t-people-using-smalltalk-80de31b6e3f4
Guido Stepken <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 03:27PM +0200

Should give you to think, that, for the Pharo team, it almost took them 8
years now (beginning may 2008) to clean up all that mess, squeak hackers
produced over time. And they aren't even finished yet.
 
Running stable? No.
 
Smalltalk definitly is not suited for being processed in enterprise
environment with changing personal. No clean, "named" interfaces that can
be communicated and trained.
 
Instead, it's Smalltalk code mostly a complete mess of objective neurons,
sending, exchanging messages between each other. Amorphic strucures. Not
communicable. That's the main problem.
 
Have fun!
"[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 03:56PM +0200

As if Java was....
 
 
> Should give you to think, that, for the Pharo team, it almost took them 8
years now (beginning may 2008) to clean up all that mess, squeak hackers
produced over time. And they aren't even finished yet.
 
> Running stable? No.
 
> Smalltalk definitly is not suited for being processed in enterprise
environment with changing personal. No clean, "named" interfaces that can
be communicated and trained.
 
> Instead, it's Smalltalk code mostly a complete mess of objective neurons,
sending, exchanging messages between each other. Amorphic strucures. Not
communicable. That's the main problem.
 
> Have fun!
 
> Am 17.08.2015 14:12 schrieb "Richard Eng" <[hidden email]>:
 
https://medium.com/@richardeng/why-aren-t-people-using-smalltalk-80de31b6e3f4
 
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"Martin Bähr" <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 04:18PM +0200

Excerpts from Guido Stepken's message of 2015-08-17 15:27:55 +0200:
> be communicated and trained.
 
> Instead, it's Smalltalk code mostly a complete mess of objective neurons,
> sending, exchanging messages between each other.
 
and that is different from any other object oriented language how?
 
you can create clean structures or messy systems in any language.
 
what do you mean by "no clean, named interfaces"?
are you talking about java interfaces?
i doubt it because that would mean that java is pretty much the only usable
language out there, and python, ruby, php and many others should suffer the
same fate as smalltalk.
 
that can't be it.
 
do you mean that none of the current interfaces in smalltalk are clean enough to be
communicated and learned? ever looked at php? now that's messy. didn't stop it
from becoming the most popular web development language for more than a decade.
 
> Amorphic strucures. Not communicable. That's the main problem.
 
i have used object oriented programming languages for more than 20 years now. i
only used smalltalk for a few months. all i can say is: same old, same old.
 
there are classes, methods, arguments, data structures, just like any other language.
the syntax is different, and control structures are a bit odd, and then there
is the builtin IDE, the ability to introspect and analyse code at runtime.
 
but other than that, i can't tell the difference between writing code in
smalltalk, or lisp, python, ruby, java. it's all the same. you have your logic,
process data, use and build modules, load them, call them, etc.
 
it's all one and the same.
 
greetings, martin.
 
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blake watson <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 08:24AM -0700

"Martin Bähr" <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 06:05PM +0200

Excerpts from blake watson's message of 2015-08-17 17:24:38 +0200:
> > >>it's all one and the same.
> > So then why would anyone use Smalltalk?
 
because of the IDE, introspection capabilities, live coding.
in other words better tooling around the language.
 
because i like the syntax, it's elegant, minimalistic.
 
because smalltalk came first. (why would i use any other language that doesn't
add anything to what smalltalk already has)
 
because i like the image concept. (it's a matter of taste though, if you don't
like it, maybe smalltalk is not for you (or use gnu-smalltalk))
 
these are all subjective reasons though. i do not believe that there are any
objective reasons for choosing any language. only sometimes language-choice is
restricted by outside requirements.
 
greetings, martin.
 
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"[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 08:03PM +0200

Because it is not the same.
 
And you can't know it unless you use it for real on something complicated
where it all makes sense.
 
And as Pharo is not Smalltalk but Smalltalk inspired, Why aren't people
using Pharo?
 
BTW a smaller community has advantages, among which people sticking to it
are quite a fine bunch and are inspiring.
It kind of beats a lot of other aspects of some communities where
StackOverflow Q&A is now the Tao of Programming.
 
Phil
 
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:24 PM, blake watson <[hidden email]>
wrote:
 
Dimitris Chloupis <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 07:04PM

Smalltalk is both a lovely environment and a set of very successful ideas.
I am using it and I invest my precious time in it while I could have used
pretty much any other things out there. Squeak is great and I am very happy
to see Pharo continue the path and keep pushing Smalltalk forward. Of
course its great seeing project like Amber push things forward.
 
For me Smalltalk is what I was looking all my life in terms of coding, and
there is nothing like it out there. On the how to make Smalltalk more
popular, I think the secret is to make it better and better. Create a
bigger more powerful library, support modern technologies, great
documentation, a more modern IDE, native GUI look, GUI designers etc. Of
course all these things take a lot of work and effort.
 
But even if Smalltalk never becomes very popular, if we keep pushing it
forward is more than enough at least for me.
 
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:03 PM [hidden email] <[hidden email]>
wrote:
 
"Herby Vojčík" <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 09:08PM +0200

> popular, I think the secret is to make it better and better. Create a
> bigger more powerful library, support modern technologies, great
> documentation, a more modern IDE, native GUI look, GUI designers etc.
 
Yeah, documentation :-/
Jeremy Shute <[hidden email]>: Aug 17 07:12PM

(Why Aren't People Using Smalltalk?)
 
...because people aren't using Smalltalk.
 
Google+ was an arguably better product than Facebook. Doesn't mean it
wasn't a ghost town.
 
Jeremy
 
Joachim Tuchel <[hidden email]>: Aug 18 01:15AM -0700

Guido,
 
your comment is unfair. Pharo has completely different goals than Squeak
has - and the code quality in Pharo is also not always excellent. But hey,
who writes perfect ode, anyways? Do you think code quality in Ruby or C#
projects is much better? I doubt it. Objective-C is a mess. Ruby even more.
Even more important: Smalltalk is so much more than just Squeak and Pharo.
So I am not sure your comment really qualifies as an answer to the (stupid)
question.
 
Joachim
 
 
Am Montag, 17. August 2015 15:27:58 UTC+2 schrieb Guido Stepken:
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