[vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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[vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
 
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I've been lurking on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It was great fun and I really love the language.
But...if you were starting over today, would you use Smalltalk (VW) for new projects? I need to write some network monitors that keep track of our sonar and navigation systems and alert us to problems in real-time. It seems like a job VW would be good at. But I can't shake the feeling the Smalltalk's best days are behind it: 1. Smalltalk doesn't seem to have a multicore strategy in place. For serious number crunching I recently silenced some of our in house C++ bigots with a concurrent version of our signal processing code written in Java (a project I originally hoped to do in Smalltalk, but didn't). On a modern workstation keeping 8 cores busy (Java) trumps running twice-as fast on a single core (C++). We moved production over to the Java version. All the hot new languages are functional, making multicore a high priority (F#, Scala, Clojure, etc.). Of course, they all suck compared to Smalltalk. The key to multi-core success in Java was using immutable classes and a top-notch concurency api. It wasn't that hard, but there is limited language support for this style. Clojure has some great ideas but you need to know Lisp and Emacs. Smalltalk is much more humane surely there is some way to get a Smalltalk process off onto its own cpu thread? 2. No Smalltalk I've used has a decent GUI. Squeak is an abomination, down the road Pharo may be good, but not today and VW looks like it hasn't been updated since the NT days. Although everyone hates Java cross-platform desktop apps, it is interesting to compare a VW app (say Bottom Feeder) to a Java app of similar design (http://www.rssowl.org/overview). In my opinion the Java version fits in a lot better than the VW version (particularly on the Mac). For cross-platform programs (we do a lot of that in my shop) it would be nice to have a RAD tool backed up with a great language like Smalltalk. Java is NOT a RAD language by any stretch of the imagination; neither Python nor Ruby have cross-platform deployment strategies in place (and no standard widget sets either). It seems to me that this could be a real boon for VW if it was done well. RealBasic? I don't know. 3. The elephant in the room with respect to VW is cost structure. It is hard to swallow today. No mainstream language charges deployment fees. I think it is fair to charge for a development image. Even renting the development image would probably be tollerable to my management if the benifits of using Smalltalk were good enough to justify the costs (we justify it for Matlab licenses out the kazoo). But it is hard to backdoor Smalltalk into our organization under the existing licensing options (as I understand them). For example, it is not clear that a government research organization like the USGS falls under the non-comercial license and per-seat licensing means that IT has to get involved to manage program deployments which would kill Smalltalk use for skunk-work projects. I know I am preaching to the converted here, but does it really make sense to start new development projects in Smalltalk today? If not, that's a shame because I want an enterprise-ready dynamic language. Cheers, David
-- David Finlayson, Ph.D. Operational Geologist U.S. Geological Survey Pacific Science Center 400 Natural Bridges Drive Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA Office: 831-427-4757 Lab: 831-427-4462 Fax: 831-427-4748 E-mail: [hidden email] _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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I will respond to some of this.
Re costs -- VW does not charge deployment costs??? GUI -- yes it has a few problems -- hopefully they will get partially corrected soon. On the other hand, we and clients we deal with seem more interested in our Seaside UI (which is not yet 100% complete). On the other hand again, I see two things here look -- what does a field or button look like. There are some 3rd party looks that work on that what you can do -- with a bit of work one can do just about anything. I have snap on/off toolbars, configurable fields and buttons etc etc. Re would I start in Smalltalk today? the answer is YES -- its great has been great and continues to be great -- we love it, it does good things for our users. NO -- we sell custom software to users -- in the past few years, and still somewhat, users (or more exactly consultants hired by users) don't like "Smalltalk", and we get a lower rating because of that. For ME I would choose ST any day. For our marketing people, I would not. David Finlayson wrote: I've been lurking on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It was great fun and I really love the language. -- Dennis Smith +1 416.798.7948 Cherniak Software Development Corporation Fax: +1 416.798.0948 509-2001 Sheppard Avenue East [hidden email] Toronto, ON M2J 4Z8 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="sip:dennis@CherniakSoftware.com">sip:dennis@... Canada http://www.CherniakSoftware.com Entrance off Yorkland Blvd south of Sheppard Ave east of the DVP _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
While I understand your issue with licensing, this is actually a pretty hard problem. If you don't have very large sales volume, per developer fees aren't a sustainable way to run a tools business - you can't really support a development staff.
I'd love to hear a contrary view that made business sense :) James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 17, 2009, at 5:33 PM, David Finlayson wrote: I've been lurking on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It was great fun and I really love the language. _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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We have a profitable business now, with growing revenues and a growing customer base. Thus, trying to make a case to mgmt that they should start accepting losses would be pretty darn hard....
James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 17, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Victor wrote:
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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nice one James.
awesome. David On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 18:45 -0400, James Robertson wrote: We have a profitable business now, with growing revenues and a growing customer base. Thus, trying to make a case to mgmt that they should start accepting losses would be pretty darn hard.... James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 17, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Victor wrote: > If you don't have very large sales volume, per developer fees aren't a sustainable way to run a tools business My opinion is that the argument is valid when you are in a stable and favorable market. However, if you want to start a new market, it's important to accept the initial losses as an investment in the future. Otherwise the new market will never be developed and the entrepreneur will not be in the future any better than at the starting point. This is a general philosophical approach, which should be accepted before engaging in any commercial activity. The details are then generated from the market realities and what the tools have to offer. If either the development or marketing are frozen for whatever reasons, it's difficult to be optimistic about the product's future. Victor ----- Original Message ----- From: [hidden email] To: [hidden email] Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 6:02 PM Subject: Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today? While I understand your issue with licensing, this is actually a pretty hard problem. If you don't have very large sales volume, per developer fees aren't a sustainable way to run a tools business - you can't really support a development staff. I'd love to hear a contrary view that made business sense :) James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 17, 2009, at 5:33 PM, David Finlayson wrote:
Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
Hi David,
I would absolutely choose Smalltalk for new development. That's my 2 cents worth. Here are more specific responses to your posting (which is, by the way, amusing and interesting). "best days are behind it" -- probably not, and language popularity is a non-issue as long as their is a stable vendor and/or an open-source version. 1. multi-core strategy -- language constructs for multi-processing are overrated. Use inter-process communication, and use the OS to distribute processes. This is much more robust and secure than threaded models. We recently tested VW sockets on some pretty run-of-the-mill Linux boxes and found we could do 10,000+ round-trip messages per second, with enough bytes on board each message to be representative of reasonable interprocess messages. You also have the choice of OpenTalk for IPC. For the record, I am a curmudgeon when it comes to "distributed objects everywhere", regardless of the language; instead, I think you will be well-served by defining the boundaries of your multiple processes (even if all are identical images), and defining the messages they send and receive. This is better than all the language support for threading and multi-core, and it is language-neutral. 2. GUI -- We are introducing some Cairo and Pango capabilities into our applications, based on things either already in VW or soon-to-be-released. This makes the finish of our UIs every bit as clean, smooth, and modern as the alternatives. You can build anything you can dream up in the way of UI widgets. I agree that the UI-painting tools fall a little short...it would be nice to have a version that was Announcement-aware, and that had direct support for a richer set of connections with the business models. Not sure you really get anything better on those points in other languages, though. (?) 3. Cost structure. Sorry, I can't comment much. Any chance of using the non-commercial for "skunk works" and only incurring the license fees when you have proved value to your organisation? Regards. Gregory Bourassa ====================================================== David Finlayson wrote: I've been lurking on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It was great fun and I really love the language. Key Technology, Inc. Disclaimer Notice - The
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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Smalltalk rules!
d On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 16:03 -0700, Gregory Bourassa wrote: Hi David, Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
David I am working on a product that
incorporates a distributed database across multiple processors, even in the
100s of processors. It does so by running multiple images. While it
may not seem as nice as having one image run in multiple cores it
side-steps some of the hard issues and is more scaleable. If you can
distribute your work among multiple images running on multiple machines
you can scale much better than if you are restricted to one
machine running on multiple cores. I don’t see the lack of a modern
looking GUI as a problem as much as the difficulty in not being able to
easily incorporate 3rd-party widgets. It is difficult to say if Smalltalk is the
way to go for your project. But, at one time I worked on some projects
involving simulation. The big concern of many people was how fast will the
simulation run. But when you really examined how the software was
used, much more time was used in developing and testing and doing
trial runs than doing a full simulation. So, being able to easily
modify the software was more important than how fast it ran. So, I would say if your monitors are going
to run for years and use a lot of CPUs, then maybe it is better to
use something like C++. But, if they are only going to be used for a
few months and under go a lot of modification, then maybe smalltalk is
the better choice. Terry From:
[hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Finlayson I've been lurking
on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught
myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice
Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and
myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research
oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our
navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the
screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It
was great fun and I really love the language. Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
I am a commercial user of VW.
I've recently replaced my VW/GLORP/Postgresql app with one built in Ruby/CouchDB. I moved to Ruby because the documentation/learning material is superior to VW, because of the number of third party components, which is partly an issue of VW not being Open Source, because of tools such as Rails, Sinatra and Merb (which I still prefer over Seaside), and because I needed to focus on sustainable technology transfer into a market that won't accept VW. Tangentially I wanted to (subjectively) quantify the productivity improvement due to Smalltalk relative to another dynamic language (as opposed to Java in Eclipse). My experience with Ruby is that the language itself is just too much of a hack, and this was especially brought home to me when I started doing Scala and Clojure, and that emphasized for me the beauty of Smalltalk and Lisp/Scheme. I'm going back to Smalltak for new commercial development, partly because of this, but also because a) the Squeak community is getting a real injection of energy with Cog and Pharo (which itself pushes Squeak) and b) I'm getting a good feeling about the way the Cincom team is changing VW - not only what they're doing, but there seems to be a much clearer vision and approach that when I first encountered it. I'm also building a commercial application in Scala and Clojure. Both are great languages, especially for highly concurrent apps, and the library support is huge because they seamlessly use Java. If this were the "good old days"(TM) I'm sure someone would be working on decent concurrency support for Smalltalk. Using multiple images is one approach, but not one that I like - it seems (IMHO) to be a reaction to the lack of resources to do something better. Most of the Erlang/ Scala/Clojure goodness could be layered into Smalltalk if someone had the will to do so, but I think Cincom would have to do that for it to get the wide support it would need to have a dependable future. One benefit that a JVM language has, as opposed to Smalltalk, is that both the underlying performance improves, and the available libraries increase and improve independently of the language. Clojure and Scala don't need effort per se to improve. Oh for a Smalltalk running on the JVM in a high performance manner, with JVM object model integration. I think there is no other way to solve this problem for Smalltalk. I really miss programming in an image despite the pain of the Object/ Subject problem. I don't think it's *always* more productive than Scala or Clojure (esp for concurrency) but it's more *consistently* productive. Smalltalk's decline has not been terminal, implementations are improving albeit more slowly than one would like, and as long as it's the right tool for the job then you should use it. On 18/03/2009, at 8:03 AM, David Finlayson wrote: > Clojure has some great ideas but you need to know Lisp and Emacs. Both Scala and Clojure have good and improving support in (to varying degrees) IntelliJ, Eclipse, and NetBeans - no Emacs/Slime/VIM required. I use Clojure and Scala in IntelliJ, and I've done so in Eclipse as well. > 2. No Smalltalk I've used has a decent GUI. Squeak is an > abomination, down the road Pharo may be good, but not today and VW > looks like it hasn't been updated since the NT days. Although > everyone hates Java cross-platform desktop apps, it is interesting > to compare a VW app (say Bottom Feeder) to a Java app of similar > design (http://www.rssowl.org/overview). In my opinion the Java > version fits in a lot better than the VW version (particularly on > the Mac). For VW, my LinkuisticsUI bundle in the public Store improves the situation somewhat on OSX for VW 7.6. Cincom are also making improvements to the OSX UI for 7.7. Closure and Scala have Swing integration. Scala has very good SWT bindings. All three IDEs have GUI builders. Maybe you should consider a Web UI - checkout tools such as Capuccino and efforts like bespin. Antony Blakey ------------- CTO, Linkuistics Pty Ltd Ph: 0438 840 787 A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
My two cents..
2009/3/18 David Finlayson <[hidden email]> In my opinion the Java version fits in a lot better than the VW version (particularly on the Mac). For cross-platform programs (we do a lot of that in my shop) it would be nice to have a RAD tool backed up with a great language like Smalltalk. Java is NOT a RAD language by any stretch of the imagination; neither Python nor Ruby have cross-platform deployment strategies in place (and no standard widget sets either). It seems to me that this could be a real boon for VW if it was done well. RealBasic? I don't know. 3. The elephant in the room with respect to VW is cost structure. It is hard to swallow today. No mainstream language charges deployment fees. I think it is fair to charge for a development image. Even renting the development image would probably be tollerable to my management if the benifits of using Smalltalk were good enough to justify the costs (we justify it for Matlab licenses out the kazoo). But it is hard to backdoor Smalltalk into our organization under the existing licensing options (as I understand them). For example, it is not clear that a government research organization like the USGS falls under the non-comercial license and per-seat licensing means that IT has to get involved to manage program deployments which would kill Smalltalk use for skunk-work projects.
Skrish Moot point will be the TCO calculations, Invariably Java dev works out lot more expensive with the number of developers required for an enterprise project, but still is accepted for various other reasons..
Especially if you are short of hands, and all hands on deck are expert programmers, I guess Smalltalk ( VW) is the best bet.
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by david.long
I've been programming since I was 10. I have yet to
see / experience anything that gives me a stronger ability to take my ideas
and put them to work. I believe this is of value to customers.
Perhaps the issue is that average tools produce average results, and that leads
to average expectations. I wouldn't be surprised myself if a potential
customer was a bit skeptical about our claims in that they are not your
everyday, average assertions. However, my experience (and that of my
/ our customers) tells me otherwise.
Andres. From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of david Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 4:55 PM To: Gregory Bourassa Cc: vwnc Subject: Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today? d On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 16:03 -0700, Gregory Bourassa wrote: Hi David, Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by Terry Raymond
Final point score in this discussion:
Smalltalk 3 David 0 On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 20:15 -0400, Terry Raymond wrote: David Terry From:[hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Finlayson
Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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Before we run off into navel gazing cheerleading, let's recognize that the mere raising of the question indicates that questions exist in the broader community. Cincom is trying to engage the community as much as it can:
-- our blogs -- My Twitter feed, and the Cincom Smalltalk one -- This mailing list -- The non-commercial download program -- Smalltalk Daily The videos are listed on Facebook, in Vimeo, Ning, YouTube, and iTunes -- Industry Misinterpretations, our weekly podcast The podcasts are listed in iTunes, Mevio, and Podcast Alley -- The periodic videos The videos are listed on Vimeo and in iTunes We're always open to suggestions and ideas as well. You can chat directly with me anytime by hitting the chatback widget on my blog James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 18, 2009, at 7:59 AM, david wrote:
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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Hi James,
well said. I would point out though that the massive marketing budgets available to Microsoft and IBM allow them to place their technology to the forefront regardless of the underlying level of quality. Just for example, the last release of Windows Vista, by a company with more than 10,000 programmers was by most accounts a failure. However, as a result of their market position, the current companies controlling the market share (Microsoft / IBM) can still fall below in terms of quality and keep their position as leaders just because they can outspend the competition in marketing. I don't think it hurts Smalltalk to defend it vigorously, and in fact - this is needed. People often repeat what they hear just because of effective marketing, not because the products they advocate are in fact as good as they could be. Another example is Linux and Windows. Linux has only a handful of known viruses, whereas Windows has created an entire multimillion dollar industry designed around just patching and defending against viruses. However, Linux is by far the least dominant technology in terms of market share. So, I'd say that anyone who wants to come into the Smalltalk arena, and start spouting off drivel about the benefits of technology that only exists because of a large marketing budget deserves what they get, at least on our own turf. respectfully, David On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 08:36 -0400, James Robertson wrote: Before we run off into navel gazing cheerleading, let's recognize that the mere raising of the question indicates that questions exist in the broader community. Cincom is trying to engage the community as much as it can: -- our blogs http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs -- My Twitter feed, and the Cincom Smalltalk one http://twitter.com/jarober http://twitter.com/cincomsmalltalk -- This mailing list -- The non-commercial download program -- Smalltalk Daily http://smalltalk-daily.cincomsmalltalk.com The videos are listed on Facebook, in Vimeo, Ning, YouTube, and iTunes -- Industry Misinterpretations, our weekly podcast http://industry-misinterpretations.cincomsmalltalk.com The podcasts are listed in iTunes, Mevio, and Podcast Alley -- The periodic videos http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?content=smalltalk_videos The videos are listed on Vimeo and in iTunes We're always open to suggestions and ideas as well. You can chat directly with me anytime by hitting the chatback widget on my blog http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 18, 2009, at 7:59 AM, david wrote: Final point score in this discussion: From:[hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Finlayson _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by david.long
--- On Wed, 3/18/09, david <[hidden email]> wrote: > Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 4:59 AM > Final point score in this discussion: > > Smalltalk 3 > David 0 Sampling errors are very easy to make. I replied privately - others may have. _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
Wow! I was surprised this morning to find so many responses. There
were some very thoughtful comments to my questions here. I appreciate that, especially people who've dipped there toes into other dynamic languages currently enjoying popularity. A few comments: James - I think you are doing a great job promoting CST. I noticed. As for how to make Smalltalk pay, who can say? All I know is that I want to try out a few programs in Smalltalk to see if productivity gains offset the pain of using a niche technology. But my conversation with your salespeople left me questioning whether it was worth it for the small projects I had in mind (think cross-platform Visual Basic apps). Alternative Smalltalks don't exist or have GUIs too weird for my purposes. Too bad Dolphin is dead. That is pretty close to what I had in mind (though not cross-platform). Antony - I really enjoyed reading your comments. I've looked closely at Clojure and Scala over the past couple of months and agree that JVM languages have enormous advantages if they can communicate easily with Java libraries. However, I don't think Clojure is ready for blub programmers like myself (tools and documentation need to stabilize) and Scala looks frighteningly complex. The major appeal of Smalltalk to me is the combined advantages of an easy syntax with a solid cross-platform strategy. Python and Ruby have the former, but trying to maintain cross-platform code bases in Python has proved to be very complicated for our team. Particularly if you need to distribute non-standard libraries with the code. There are only a couple of us programing to support about 50 scientists and all their weird instruments (many of which we build in our shops). By the way, I looked at your web site and would be very interested to hear (off list) if you have managed to get Smalltalk communicating with ESRI products (or other mapping software) that is very close to my domain. _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:00:07 -0700
David Finlayson <[hidden email]> wrote: > Too bad Dolphin is dead. That is pretty close to what I had > in mind (though not cross-platform). Dolphin is not dead. It is being moved onto a new foundation. Also, Andy Bower has posted some video tutorials lately. http://www.object-arts.com/content/news/excitingNews.html s. _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc |
Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
Absolutely We build and maintain a Payment Processing
platform build using VisualWorks and MS SQL server. I would reconsider several
of our technology and architecture choices (some would be no-brainers other
harder); but I would not select a different language. We believe the
productivity gains offset the disadvantages some people see in Smalltalk. The
productivity gains come in two parts:
As for the perceived disadvantages:
Joerg From:
[hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Finlayson I've been lurking
on this list for more than a year now (Squeak and Pharo, too). I've taught
myself Smalltalk from the Purple book, read Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice
Patterns (awsome book) and I've written a few games in Squeak for my kids and
myself (working on a planetarium program in my spare time). I am a research
oceanographer and during one cruise I hooked a Squeak image up to our
navigation stream using UDP and had little icons of our boat driving around the
screen with pirate boats chasing it (pictures of my boss of course!). It
was great fun and I really love the language. Cheers, David
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by Stefan Schmiedl
awesome. Sampling errors are very easy to make, indeed they are ;-) On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 20:48 +0100, Stefan Schmiedl wrote: On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:00:07 -0700 David Finlayson <[hidden email]> wrote: > Too bad Dolphin is dead. That is pretty close to what I had > in mind (though not cross-platform). Dolphin is not dead. It is being moved onto a new foundation. Also, Andy Bower has posted some video tutorials lately. http://www.object-arts.com/content/news/excitingNews.html s. _______________________________________________ vwnc mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc
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Re: [vwnc] Would you start a new Smalltalk project today?
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In reply to this post by David Finlayson-4
This is actually from Arden Thomas, our product manager - he's having some email issues today:
Hi David; On multicore; you will be able to leverage multi-cores on our products in the near future. Please look at my multi core redux, and series of multi-core experiments, with an experimental mutli core framework built by Cincom Smalltalk engineers. HTH James Robertson Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library On Mar 18, 2009, at 2:00 PM, David Finlayson wrote:
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