
Smalltalk ruined my life - horrido
https://medium.com/p/smalltalk-ruined-my-life-aaf2190f6f16
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gk1
From the author's LinkedIn profile:

> Leading a marketing and PR campaign to promote and popularize the Smalltalk
> programming language.

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horrido
I've never made any bones about this. Of course, I'm an evangelist.

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prodigal_erik
"Provably the most productive" seems to boil down to estimating that Smalltalk
is more terse in statements per function point. Incidentally, by that metric
Python is only half as productive as Visual Basic, which doesn't seem
plausible. No comment about extra test coverage and prod bugs caused by lack
of static typing.

"Image-based persistence" means your production-ready code and dinking around
during prototyping (in a language with frictionless monkey-patching!) are all
buried in one big mutable blob. It's often argued the impedance mismatch with
version control is what killed Smalltalk.

~~~
horrido
"It's often argued the impedance mismatch with version control is what killed
Smalltalk."

Wrong argument. Here's the truth: [https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-
smalltalk-failed-to-do...](https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk-
failed-to-dominate-the-world-93e7e4195039)

Smalltalk does have version control. It's just not the same version control
software that everybody else uses (eg, Git, Subversion, etc.).

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SlipperySlope
But where are the libraries? Compare the size of Smalltalk's ecosystem to
Java's.

Not to mention the various competing flavors of Smalltalk, whose code bases
may be incompatible with one another.

~~~
horrido
The size of the Smalltalk user base isn't large enough to support a healthy
ecosystem. Hence, the reason for my evangelism to grow the community!

Another issue is fragmentation: there are too many dialects. That's why I
generally promote Pharo, which is the largest open source Smalltalk. If I can
get developers to rally around Pharo, then we will have the best chance of
developing a strong ecosystem.

