
Bits of history, words of advice - rauhl
https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-of-advice.html
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smitty1e
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth
to them all."

[https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/ecc/9/11/s_668011](https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/ecc/9/11/s_668011)

~~~
hodgesrm
Love that quote. It's amazing how much basic understanding about human affairs
was worked out by 500BC.

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mcguire
From this article:

" _So why didn 't Smalltalk take over the world?_

" _With 20 /20 hindsight, we can see that from the pointy-headed boss
perspective, the Smalltalk value proposition was:_

" _Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP,
looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much
easier to maintain and develop though!_

On top of that, a fair amount of bad luck. _"

That's not the "pointy-headed boss" perspective. That's _my* perspective, and
I was working in Smalltalk in 1992-4, when "why doesn't Smalltalk take over
the world?" was a valid question.

FFIs were a royal pain in the ass, and that was what I was doing. (Somehow,
the Digitalk (? Memory is hard.) image we were passing around developed a bug,
probably from something in the FFI. It would periodically just crash. No way
to fix it---it originally started while our proggy was working but eventually
worked its way out until it happened anytime---because something in the image
itself was corrupted. We could have filed-out all of our code and started with
a clean image....

Source control? Ha! You saved your image to a floppy and passed it around to
your co-workers. And you liked it!

Deployment? Yeah, we once had to send our proggy to someone who didn't have
licenses for some of the things we used. That was fun. And it still involved
shipping the whole language, image and environment.

These aren't just some "nice to have" features; they were significant friction
that made doing anything real difficult. (Common LISP had the same issues,
although its source control story was much better.)

I haven't looked at Newspeak (or Strongtalk, or Self) (but I will) to find out
how it deals with those problems, but as for "Why _doesn 't_ Smalltalk take
over the world?", that bus has already left the station.

EDIT

[https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html](https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html)

" _The current prototype is based on Squeak, and contains code that is subject
to the Squeak License, as well as the Newspeak sources, which are mostly under
the Apache 2.0 license. More details about the licensing of this software are
available on the license page._ "

This isn't starting well.

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mcguire
I hadn't heard of the Perlis quote, so I had to look it up. Source of the
Perlis quote:

" _It isn’t going to do us a bit of good to throw before them [those for whom
FORTRAN is mother 's milk] an APL one-liner that will do as well as 50 lines
of FORTRAN. First of all, it will take the people a long time to learn how to
use the one-liner and even more to write one, so that FORTRAN will continue to
grow and succeed. And I don’t think APL will usurp its position; there’s no
reason why it should. And it certainly shouldn’t be a goal of people who use
APL to stand forth and say, “Why do you jackasses use these inferior
linguistic vehicles when we have something here that’s so precious, so
elegant, which gives me so much pleasure? How can you be so blind and so
foolish?” That debate you’ll never win, and I don’t think you ought to try._"

[https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm](https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm)

Yes, folks, Alan Perlis is talking about APL, Greek letters and all.

Another quote from that:

" _As a professor, one of the things I’m interested in doing is teaching
people how to program; but it’s more than teaching them how to program,
because to teach people how to program, any programming language is
sufficient. The idea that only one language or any particular language is
critical to learning what it means to program is false. If that is your goal,
to teach people how to build programs, BASIC is perfectly satisfactory. There
are some things you can’t do in it; therefore, you invent constructions for
doing them; and the invention of these constructions is learning to program.
Sooner or later, in all languages, we have to go to constructions which we
build laboriously and arduously out of the components of the language. And we
curse the fact that the language doesn’t have them already. But they are not
all there now, and they never will be there. The word that I associate with
programming — and I’m sure everybody associates with programming — is:
“frustration”. Everything is possible, and nothing is easy. We sit down to
write a program, and our initial, beautiful thoughts soon get bogged down in
the slime of unavailable constructions. And we write procedures, or functions,
or what-have-you, and more functions; we invent data structures, and more data
structures; and the programs which start out so nice and elegant soon become
mired down and have no structure. We find it difficult to describe to anyone
else what they do. And we say, “If I programmed differently, if I used, for
example, ‘structured programming’ this wouldn’t happen … if I had arrays of
arrays this wouldn’t happen … if I had a while-statement this wouldn’t happen
…” Nonsense. If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow, even with
all those things there. Because programming, by its very nature, is a kind of
bootstrapping activity. What Iverson and God give you today, you’ll find
insufficient tomorrow._ "

I love Alan Perlis.

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Gys
About Smalltalk

