Comment by frou_dh
18 hours ago
I imagine that's a deliberate decision of the overall project to try and get people to evaluate it on its merits, rather than associating it with something old and unfashionable.
18 hours ago
I imagine that's a deliberate decision of the overall project to try and get people to evaluate it on its merits, rather than associating it with something old and unfashionable.
I think this was once the case. Smalltalk was very "so last year" once Java Marketing overtook the world (I worked for Cincom, final resting place of VisualWorks Smalltalk, may it rest in peace).
At this point, I think it's flipped. The people that might be attracted to it would probably enjoy the retro hat tip. The various language wars have all been pointlessly adjudicated, and lost in time, first to the dominance/explosion of JavaScript only programmers, and now due to LLM generated code.
Learning Smalltalk, and practicing it heavily for 20 years was probably the single best thing I learned in programming during 35+ years. It helped me get very good at modelling things. I work in Swift/Kotlin/Elixir/C now days, and I've learned some great things from those systems as well. But how to build representations of real world data as well as structure concepts/relationships more virtual, hands down to Smalltalk (for me).
I learnt Smalltalk on Smalltalk/V for Windows 3.1, so I also watched that transition take place.
Not sure how it was seen from inside at Cincom, however having a couple of Smalltalk vendors quickly pivoting from Smalltalk into Java, to the point most IDEs and libraries that appeared where from Smalltalk origin, was what ended up killing all existing interest into keeping using Smalltalk products.
There was this language that Sun was pushing for free, with SDKs on cover CDs, alongside plenty of stuff coming from Smalltalk, why pay for expensive Smalltalk IDEs, seemed to be the opinion back then.
So we ended up with Java, .NET, Objective-C, as half way to the whole Smalltalk experience.