Comment by bowsamic
4 months ago
I always found it too fragile. There’s a reason why smalltalk VMs have such good recovery features, it’s incredibly easy to brick your system when it’s all a network of objects, and I’m sure anyone who has worked in smalltalk has done so many times
How can it be fragile if there are "such good recovery features"?
Just restore unsaved changes when you launch the same image again. That's robust not fragile.
https://drcuis.github.io/TheCuisBook/The-Change-Log.html
The recovery features are external, and exist to solve a problem that is specific to smalltalk
You may as well claim that computers are robust because you can just buy a new one. It has nothing to do with computers
Pretty sure ST-80 doesn’t even mandate recovery features, which is pretty scary
Huh? The recovery features are built-in to Smalltalk implementations.
I used to find it amusing that you could say `Smalltalk := nil` in the early days of Squeak, and poof! all the classes in your system are garbage collected.
(I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened, probably the system crashed before garbage collection could happen. But it was definitely a guaranteed insta-crash).