
Dolphin Smalltalk Goes Open-Source - mpweiher
http://object-arts.com/gettingstarted.html
======
protomyth
MIT License listed at the github site. Had some Smalltalk using friends who
really liked it.

------
srott
Back in 2007, they refused to open the source, I think the authors just
hated(!) the open source movement. Why so sudden change?

~~~
Avshalom
8-9 years isn't sudden.

I mean I know it feels like yesterday if you don't stop to think about it.

~~~
ethbro
That depends on how old one is, I suppose. ;)

------
marvel_boy
Well done. Dolphin ST is an excellent product.

------
analognoise
How does this compare to Pharo?

~~~
david-given
Dolphin's aimed at traditional app development --- you can use it to produce
standalone native-look-and-feel apps which you can deploy separately from the
IDE. (Although I suspect that what you get is a minified VM image and a
runtime rather than true offline compilation.)

I believe it has a decent following in banking and stockbroking environments,
presumably because Smalltalk's traditionally good at RAD and it lets them
knock out database frontends very quickly. Certainly, whenever you hear actual
customers talk about it, they all seem to like it.

------
systems
should programming languages evolve

its nice to have FOSS implementations of things like smalltalk

but shouldnt we look more forward to languages such as rust, perl 6, go, red
.... or at least ocaml and haskell

is this useful for anything beyond legacy systems?

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
I have one word for you: Seaside.

Stuff done in smalltalk still manages to stay far ahead of everything else.
Most of our intranet stuff runs it, simply because doing simple form-
sumbission stuff with many pages is so much faster and simpler to smash out in
seaside.

The only downside is that people have started getting used to the backbutton
actually working when doing stuff like that online.

------
plinkplonk
From [http://object-arts.com/](http://object-arts.com/)

"It’s fairly clear that huge systems cannot be created using static typing.
It’s just not feasible to assume that whenever a small type change is made,
all other components that reference this type will be able to be recompiled."

"cannot be made"? really? heh.

"The World Wide Web is one such massive system that relies on dynamic binding
at runtime in order to maintain flexibility and practicality.

As we look to build increasingly large software systems we shouldn’t just rely
on this one endeavour to validate Smalltalk’s rejection of static typing. In
nature we find systems that are orders of magnitude larger than any of the
software we have succeeded in building so far. A biological ecosystem is
composed of many organisms, each of which is made up of organs, then cells,
then organelles and macromolecules - all towering atop the fundamental
building blocks of molecules and atoms. All of these subsystems are
dynamically bound together. At each level, elements will handle valid messages
from their neighbours and safely reject messages that are, for whatever
reason, not understood. In nature there is no compile time validation. In
nature there is no compiler."

Sounds very kool-aid-ey to me.

