<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 11, 2007 11:48 AM, Jason Johnson <<a href="mailto:jason.johnson.081@gmail.com">jason.johnson.081@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Nov 10, 2007 5:50 PM, Laurence Rozier <<a href="mailto:laurence.rozier@gmail.com">laurence.rozier@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>><br>> A careful look at the history Java seems to indicate otherwise. Java didn't
<br>> replace C++ in the business world because C++ never got rooted there outside<br>> of engineering and embedded apps.<br><br></div>A careful look at every big business I have worked with says<br>otherwise. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> The organization I'm at now is in fact half way into this<br>transition from C++ to Java. Granted my conclusions are based on a
<br>very small subset of the IT industry.</blockquote><div> </div><div>Ok and what time frame are you talking about? I'm looking at the time when Java came into broader use because things were in a major state of flux then ...
<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I assume your conclusions come<br>from the "Smalltalk Reloaded: Bits of History From the Golden Age"
<br>article? Perhaps this was the case, but the fortune 500 orgs I've<br>worked for all were doing C or C++ and slowly moving toward Java.</blockquote><div><br>In the early 1990's as noted in <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n2_v15/ai_16715770">
this 1995 Software Magazine article</a>, corporate IT was making a transtion from mainframe to client-server architectures. COBOL was the defacto development standard for business apps but wasn't suited for this new "enterprise" paradigm. The C crowd that had said thru the 80's objects weren't needed couldn't deliver so they claimed to have joined the bandwagon with C++. However, C++not only didn't fare very well on large projects or for rewriting COBAL apps and was clearly far too difficult a transition for COBOL programmers. For a brief period, the momentum had swung in Smalltalk's favor and most large new projects were deploying with Smalltalk.
<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Nor was Java mentioned when <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n7_v15/ai_17385482">Digitalk and ParcPlace merged later that year</a>. In fact, at the end of 1995, IBM which had only recently licensed Java was still
<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/is_199512/ai_n8715994">touting VisualAge over Java for the web</a>! At the time the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_EE_version_history#JPE_.28May_1998.29">Java Enterprise Edition Platform spec
</a>was
announced in <u><b>1998</b>,</u> none of the incompatible Smalltalk offerings from a
stagnant ParcPlace-Digitalk, an indifferent IBM, a research-oriented
Squeak, or single platform Object-Arts was really focused on delivering
internet aware solutions. Java and Ruby merely stepped in and filled a
vacuum.<br><a href="http://squeak.funkencode.com/2007/10/13/smalltalk-reloaded-marketing-isnt-the-problem/">Smalltalk Reloaded: Marketing Isn't The Problem</a><br><br></div>According to Squeak Central:<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">
In December of
1995, the authors found themselves wanting a development
environment in which to build educational software that could be
used—and even programmed—by non-technical people, and
by children. ... We considered using
Java but, despite its promise, Java was not yet mature: its
libraries were in a state of flux, few commercial implementations
were available, and those that were available lacked the hooks
required to create the kind of dynamic change that we envisioned. ... <br><a href="ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html">Back To The Future</a><br></div><div style="margin-left: 40px;"></div></div>
</div><br>It's hard to say what would have happened in a world where Smalltalk momentum was still rising, and the vacuum that a repurposed Java filled never existed. I think a lot of people would gladly trade a Haskell-sized niche for a ubiquitous Smalltalk based ecosystem like VisualAge where C++, Java and others could play together nicely.
<br><br>So when we're talking about reinventing the future, I for one would like to get back to something that almost came to be - if was done once, it can be done again.<br>