At 10:05 PM +0000 1/12/02, Gary McGovern wrote:
>Thank you very much John, that's good information. But I'm quite sure Squeak 
>Central could have manipulated Java to have those features (licenses 
>permitting).

Well, I suppose we could have built our own Java VM, then added
the dynamic programming features, although I'm not sure we could have
called the resulting system "Java". But I think that all of us felt that
if we were going to build a VM ourselves, we might as well build a
Smalltalk VM. Remember, when we started Squeak we really didn't
plan to create an open source language; that happened a year later.
Orginally we simply wanted a vehicle for our research into kids
programming environments.


>It's not just the kids that like dynamic programming ;-),I like it and I'm 
>sure NASA would find it useful. As I originally said, I prefer the Squeak 
>technology. I was thinking people.

You're right, there are a lot of Java and C/C++ programmers out there.
But we've got a lot of terrific Squeak programmers right here! More
people isn't necessary better; quality people are probably more important.
Furthermore, we've had good success in using open-source C libraries
from Squeak: the MPEG and JPEG libraries are two good examples.
So we actually do leverage some of the open source work done in C/C++.

For professional programming, Squeak has two disadvantages. First,
you can't compile a small, stand-along executable. Of course, the same is
true of Java. Second, Squeak makes management very nervous. Most managers
are happiest doing the "safe" thing, the thing that everyone else does, which
is C++ or Java. Fortunately, in education and research settings, these issues
are usually not a problem.

	-- John