
Is This the Future of Software Development? - jacksonoz
https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/pharo-the-future-of-software-development-1eff6240c60b
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AnimalMuppet
No, it isn't. If Smalltalk were going to be the future of software
development, it would have shown some sign of it by now. All the claimed
advantages have been there since the 1980, but in nearly 40 years, Smalltalk
has yet to be anything more than a niche player.

Maybe the advantages come with some disadvantages, which wildly gushing
articles like this ignore?

OK, there's a new Smalltalk on the market. Unless it knows what the previous
disadvantages were, and has fixed them to the satisfaction of developers,
Smalltalk isn't going anywhere. This article gives no hint that they even
recognized that there ever had been disadvantages.

~~~
jacksonoz
Yes, all the advantages have been there from the start, but they may not be
known to most people. It's really a matter of education and public awareness.

Smalltalk is not the only language to face this dilemma. Nearly every new
language that comes to market does, as well. For example, Ceylon, Clojure,
Crystal, Dart, Elixir, Haxe, Julia, Nim, Rust.

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karmakaze
> The interesting thing about this study is that it goes beyond simple coding
> and programming; it takes the entire software project into consideration
> [...]. They want to know the full cost of applications and their complete
> schedules from requirements through delivery. They also want to know multi-
> year maintenance and enhancement costs plus total cost of ownership.

So it's not just comparing programming languages. And for each language there
are a multitude of toolchains for solving these other factors. If you find the
most efficient of each of those and compare as well as other factors not even
mentioned (e.g. how do multiple remote developers work on an image?) the
picture will be quite different.

~~~
jacksonoz
It is comparing programming languages. The study averages over all the
language projects, including their choice of preferred toolchains. If there
are more effective toolchains available, their lack of usage is clearly
factored into the study.

~~~
karmakaze
That's a good point. But reducing a programming language ecosystem to one
number isn't the statistic I'm interested in. I want to see the distribution
in some way e.g. standard deviation. What's 'good' in each look like?

