[squeak-dev] Re: Renaming "Squeak"

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Wed May 14 17:10:55 UTC 2008


On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini at gnu.org> wrote:
> Germán Arduino wrote:
>
>  I think this "I wanna change the world" attitude is what has kept Smalltalk
> back in the last 10 years, compared to the more pragmatic view of, say, the
> Python and Ruby communities.
>
>  Paolo

I disagree.  In fact, I think Erlang has shown us that if anything
Smalltalk should go further (e.g. automatically make better use of
available CPUs).

>From what I have understood of the history, the thing that kept
Smalltalk and Lisp back has been money.  These two superior solutions
simply costed more then inferior solutions, and these lessor solutions
were even free.  True that Smalltalk/Lisp are more productive
environments, but how much is that worth for an idea that you're not
even sure if it will work?

The most ironic thing for me is; lots of people in the "open source"
community have the silly idea that the world is moving toward some
kind of "gift society", based on the success of "free software".  The
reality is that so called "free software" is simply another
demonstration of effective capitalism, specifically the "loss leader"
[1] strategy.

Smalltalk and Lisp didn't lose because they were less effective,
inferior, alien or any of those things.  They lost in plain simple
capitalism [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
[2] Well, early on performance concerns were also an issue, but based
on technologies that actually did get used, I'm guessing this concern
was not as big as we think.



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