Complexity and starting over on the JVM (ideas)

Laurence Rozier laurence.rozier at gmail.com
Sun Feb 10 02:15:07 UTC 2008


On Feb 9, 2008 3:38 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:

> ...
>
> As I see it, you could look at the ubiquitousness of the JVM one of two
> ways
> (or both at the same time :-). Either Smalltalk failed, because most
> people
> are not using a pure Smalltalk VM. Or, on the other hand, Smalltalk
> succeeded enormously because just about everyone now programs with most of
> the ideas you and Alan (and others) got going in a big way in the
> 1960s/1970s -- objects, garbage collection, a cross-platform virtual
> machine, fancy IDEs like Eclipse, and so on, even to the point where a
> major
> technology company changes its stock ticker symbol to be the name of an
> object-oriented virtual machine (JAVA). Maybe the the JVM and the world is
> still not Smalltalk-ish 100%, and maybe there has been a lot of needless
> suffering along the way, but as I've heard, "first they ignore you, then
> they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." :-)
>

Indeed - the power of the Smalltalk
meme<http://croquet.funkencode.com/2007/04/07/evolution-in-cyberspace-the-smalltalk-meme/>!
One other potentially huge benefit of Smalltalk-Java symbiosis is the
increased opportunity to explore/exploit hardware support. While I remain
very impressed with and interested in Plurion, diversity is good and there
are many mulit-core and FPGA Java projects ongoing including Sun's
OpenSPARC<http://www.rhythmeering.com/2007/10/19/fpga-based-processors-move-forward/>.


Cheers,

Laurence
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20080209/fd0da63d/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list