[squeak-dev] what is holding back Smalltalk?

Brad Fuller bradallenfuller at gmail.com
Fri Nov 21 06:40:34 UTC 2008


Keith,

That's a great story. We should put that on the website!


On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Keith Hodges <keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> In his words, he is "extremely prejudiced" against Smalltalk, even
>> though he used it during a big project "back in the day."  He calls it
>> a "quirky, unusual" language that you can do "great and powerful
>> things" with.  The "Father of real object oriented programming," but
>> only a "niche" language that small groups of bright people use to go
>> of and accomplish amazing things with.  But, because the business is
>> full of "ordinary" people, he thinks you would never be able to find
>> anyone to work with the code you have written as a business when your
>> Smalltalk developers leave for other pursuits.
> I once wrote a simulator for telecoms equipment. The original demo took
> 2 weeks to produce in order to convince my boss.
>
> After 3 months work, the simulator was simulating a single piece of
> equipment 2 months before real equipment was available. This gave the
> whole team a considerable head start. After a further 6-8 months the
> simulation was doing 1000 pieces of equipment simultaneously, of 3
> different varieties, while at the same time simulating up to 20 users
> prodding the management system. There were 1500 unit tests ensuring that
> everything was according to spec. The simulation turned out to be key to
> proof of concept for our clients signing on the dotted line.
>
> On the other side of the office, a contractor attempted to write a
> similar simulator for another piece of equipment, in perl. After a year
> that was scapped and a team of 4 started in Java. That was also scapped
> and a top guru tried again in java, his efforts ran on 10 pcs! Finally,
> last I heard another extremely expensive contractor was starting again
> in C++.
>
> I estimate (being generous) that they must have spent over a half a
> million pounds on that failed project, and that doesnt include some
> rather expensive bought in libraries (for which source code was not
> visible). Little ol- me knocked up my Smalltalk equivalent for perhaps
> 5-10% of the cost. (we did buy an ST/X licence for £2000).
>
> When I went on holiday, the only non-programmer in my team, the guy
> doing automated testing was quite able to fix bugs, run unit tests and
> keep things going. When I left the company the entire system was handed
> over to a perl programmer, and last I heard it was still being used by 9
> people daily. I must ring up and ask if it reached its 10th bithday.
>
> So... if your boss is happy to spend 10x as much to get a poorer
> result... there is not much else can be said.
>
> cheers
>
> Keith
>
>



-- 
Brad Fuller


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