Mark Volkmann wrote:
On Nov 20, 2008, at 5:28 PM, David Mitchell wrote:
Most of the things that make Smalltalk great (what makes Smalltalk Smalltalk) are the things that hold it back for a lot of people.
Maybe I'm naive on this, but it seems like it should be easy convince lots of people that Smalltalk has a beautiful syntax and a wonderful development environment.
No it is not, most people will ask, "where are my {};".
If you want a more Unixy, scripty, Smalltalkish thing with syntax blended C and Perl that you can hack with a text editor, try Ruby.
I think this depends on how we define "scripty". I take that to mean quick, short, one off programs. I personally use Ruby for that today.
<aside>For me, thats Perl</aside>
However, I'd like to be able to use Squeak when things get a little bigger. For example, suppose I want to run an application every night that queries a database, produces some text report and emails it to several people.
Honestly, thats Perl for me, too, hence scripting.
I don't see any reason why those kinds of applications should be difficult to write and deploy using Squeak, but they seem pretty difficult to me today because I can't get the headless stuff to work.
I agree with you there, it is not really difficult. The headless issue however, might just be a minor Squeak problem, thats not really a Smalltalk issue.
What I use(d) Smalltalk for, was mostly GUI stuff (though I use SWT for that nowadays, at work at least) and applications having a large domain model behind. That is what you can use a high level language like Smalltalk for, in my opinion that is what it was meant for. I have done my fair share of "Scripting" in Smalltalk, and it is a pain when compared to the close integration of Perl with the OS APIs (especially on Unix).
What is holding Smalltalk back then (train of thought order only)?
- In my opinion, in part, licensing models - the crud which is called VB which is used to implement actual applications - the absence of a standard Smalltalk with a standard class hierarchy - Java and C# due to their huge amount of both useful and useless frameworks - Almost no one teaches Smalltalk (I was among the last of my university who learned Smalltalk)
Just my two cents.