At 06:31 PM 2/12/99 -0600, Albert Wagner wrote:
>Microsoft is a known predator and you're are suggesting that smalltalk
volunteer
>to become prey?  What comes out the south end of a north  bound predator
looks
>nothing like what went in.  And the gene pool is smaller.

What I'm suggesting is that Microsoft MAY be considering seriously backing
SOME alternative language. Languages such as C++, Visual Basic, and Perl,
have all become rather more popular than Smalltalk ever was/is. Yet, I
believe for a large category of problems, Smalltalk is technically very
superior.

I guess I'd rather see a larger slice of humanity get the benefits of
Smalltalk, instead of it remaining popular only among a tiny fringe group.
Even if this means it has to be polluted. The pollution would probably be
both changing things that really need changing, and also changing things to
fit the Microsoft environment better. This would not mean anything has to
change in Squeak, as there isn't any Smalltalk conformance police. I'd be
in favor of letting alternative Smalltalk implementations compete on their
own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Squeak is simply not a viable
implementaion for delivering a high volume commercial application running
under Windows. Squeak is also not a fully viable implementaion for delivery
on hardware with no underlying OS (there is no Smalltalk infrastructure to
implement device drivers for example). In the past, I believe Smalltalk did
run on bare hardware (perhaps those who know could fill us in on what
facilities where available).

One view might be, would you rather have Microsoft design some brand new
language and apply their marketing to it or would you rather Microsoft make
some language derived from Smalltalk and apply their marketing to it. I
personally think much of the core of Smalltalk has withstood the test of
time extreemly well. What other computer language has had as stable or as
simple a basic syntax as Smalltalk?

Of course this is all pure speculation, for all we know Microsoft has
already decided to deliver Visual Mumble, and try and convince everybody
how good it is. I'd personally like to see them use some of their fortunes
to actually advance the state of software development. You'd think if they
spent $100M, they could come up with something pretty decent if not
downright impressive. I don't know how much Xerox spent at Parc for
Smalltalk to get originally created, but I'll bet a lot less than $100M. It
also seems quite possible the state of the art in computer languages has
advanced since 1980. I'm not so sure about Java, seems like the Java
community is still rediscovering many of the things the Smalltalk community
dealt with 10 years ago. The Self project at Stanford/Sun certainly pushed
the language and implementation envelope. Not sure I'd want to ship such
new and unproven stuff to 100 million users though. Have there been any
large development projects in a prototype based language?

The lack of widespread acceptance of Smalltalk like languages and the
overwhelming popularity of languages like C++ is one of the bigger
dissappointments in my professional life (about 5 years of direct
implementation work, and many more years of tinkering). Those of you who
have been working on it for 20 years might have a different picture.

- Jan
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