Another one from blogosfere. For our rethinking ...

http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/99

A lack of productivity is killing Smalltalk.

I heard today that the development of Dolphin Smalltalk has been 
discontinued. Although it isn’t a product I used or was familiar with, I 
have been involved with a number of Smalltalk-based development efforts 
in the past. While it was somewhat popular in the late 1980s and early 
1990s, the commercial usage of Smalltalk has declined significantly 
since then.

Slava Pestov suggests how poor implementations are leading to the 
downfall of Smalltalk. I would tend to agree, to some extent. Most 
Smalltalk implementations really don’t compare to a development platform 
like Java, or even what Microsoft has put together with C# and .NET.

However, I would tend to think that the main reason why Smalltalk has 
started to really fall out of favor is that it doesn’t bring the level 
of productivity that it used to, relative to other technologies. Back in 
the early 1990s, a lot of enterprise-grade software was written using C 
or C++. For developing complex business applications, Smalltalk often 
did offer a very significant productivity boost to developers, even if 
the runtime performance of the applications suffered somewhat. Being at 
a higher-level, it allowed business rules and concepts to be more easily 
and effectively represented in the software itself.

But that started to change by the mid-1990s. Java arose, and offered 
many of the benefits that Smalltalk had been offering. That’s not to say 
that Java, as a language, is comparable to Smalltalk. In many ways it’s 
quite inferior, even over a decade after its initial release. But it was 
more familiar to those developers who’d come from the world of C and 
C++, while also offering OO functionality and garbage collection similar 
enough to that of Smalltalk.

I’ve worked with several excellent Smalltalk developers in the past. A 
talented, experienced professional can do wonders with Smalltalk. 
Unfortunately for them, Java and its vast array of classes, class 
libraries and frameworks have brought a similar level of productivity to 
only average developers. So if these average developers can churn out an 
adequate software product at a lower cost than the Smalltalk expert, as 
has often become the case, then the business will flow towards the Java 
developers.

Unless the Smalltalk developers bring something to the party that 
drastically increases their productivity (or their software’s 
productivity) over that put out by Java developers, they won’t have a 
real chance at survival.




-- 
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si