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This is an awesome, awesome pitch for the research of dynamic languages, both in real-world and academic settings. You can tell Steve Yegge's enthusiasm for the topic, 'cause it just gushes out, and it's pretty infectious. I don't even really like discussing programming languages, and I'm geeked right now about trace trees and type feedback compilation.



He mentions that "yesterdays dynamic languages had great performance and tools" - well, I never experienced any of the xerox greatness myself (lisp and smalltalk machines), but in the 90s I was a user of many small talk apps (before I was a developer) - and they were a horrible, horrible experience. I think the people building them got off on the cool development environment, forgot that there were end users taht didn't care how they worked underneath. So I can't agree with that. I think its rose coloured history. A lot of those tools died cause they didn't yield anything useful for end users.


Well, for one thing, there are a lot of production Smalltalk applications out there still. Some of them are quite good. There are also a lot of bad implementations out there, but that is true for any language. (Sturgeon's Law!)

The Smalltalk Refactoring browser is still very impressive, though it has now been surpassed by Eclipse. It predated Eclipse by some years, however. There are other tools that were developed under Smalltalk that have yet to be adopted by other programming communities. Also, the performance of the fastest Smalltalk VMs has been very good for many years now. Bad architecture will swamp even programs in C or assembly. I'd hazard a guess that you were dealing with that.

But you are correct that there are serious problems with many of the Smalltalk implementations. None of these had anything to do with the language, the tools, or the VMs. Rather, there was a legacy of "ivory tower" mentality. Instead of doing very necessary but unglamorous things like polishing the GUI framework (and eliminating race conditions) implementors preferred to do cool things like create new garbage collection options.

Smalltalk suffered because community input was neglected, because the same community fostered an elitist culture, because marketing went for an more closed "boutique" approach, and because implementations weren't polished to true professional standards. It would behoove Ruby, Python, and others to heed these lessons. (And I'd note that they've done many things right.)




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