I will not argue whether or not Smalltalk and Lisp were right all along.
However, the fact that Smalltalk and Lisp are where they are is not
simply a matter of technical merit. There were many, many, political
decisions made by the owners of the technology which participated in its
successes and failures.
Proprietary, commercial, expensive, and the varying corporate entities
one had to deal with in order to use this software was a huge factor. Us
small guys who would want to use this fantastic enabling technology had
our limitations in acquiring this technology. You had to have money and
really want to spend it in this manner.
This is not to make derogatory statements about their decisions. But
they did have an impact. Had the best of Smalltalk and Lisp been open
sourced 20 to 30 years ago. Would this be a very different world? I
think so. However, the income and profits of those corporations would
have been different also. It wasn't our decision to make and we were not
living in their shoes. We would have to become knowledgeable about the
economics, the state of the competition, the state of their own
business, etc. to become even reasonably qualified to judge. Even then
different people make different decisions because they think differently
or even possibly are looking for different results. Open source was a
different and very foreign world back then. It was a very foreign
thought to open source your intellectual property and believe that you
could earn a living from it. You do have to think different to be a
creator of open source software and to be successful at making a living
from it.
What if Sun put the effort into Strongtalk that they put into Java?
Where would we be?
I personally believe Smalltalk and Lisp had it right. Own the entire
environment and machine. Turtles all the way down.
Unfortunately the world isn't so clean. However, we do have a very nice
open source Smalltalk inspired tool in Pharo. While the past was not in
our control. We do have a say about the future. :)
Lets make the future great!
Shalom Aleichem
Jimmie
On 01/20/2016 10:13 AM, Dimitris Chloupis wrote:
indeed python and C++ are not just diffirent but two languages going
the exact opposite directions, Python emphasizing speed of development
, C++ emphasizing speed of execution.
In C/C++ every decision must be based upon performance, this not how
any other language works , even Java is not that worried about
performance, sure its important but it is not the main goal.
Hence its not surprising that C++ is the undisputed choice for very
performance orientated fields, like Gaming, audio , science that
involves heavy calculation. Look at python how popular it has become
for scientists but AFTER the fact that so many C++ libraries have been
made for python like numpy/scipy and Blaze.
So you are absolute to say that some people migrate to dynamic
languages not just for dynamic types and is also to say that people
stick with C++ and C not because of static types. If that was the case
python would not implement optional static types and C++ would not
implement generics.
The important thing to note here is that we no longer at 80 and 90s ,
nowdays you can combine any language with anything else and the vast
majority of projects are written in multiple languages.
I dont agree with the remark "Smalltalk and Lisp were right all along"
, obviously they were not because the entire world would have been
using smalltalk and lisp which we dont. To claim so is to try to
simplify coding and with every simplification it loses a part of the
truth.
On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 5:57 PM Martin Bähr
<mba...@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at
<mailto:mba...@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at>> wrote:
Excerpts from Dimitris Chloupis's message of 2016-01-20 12:36:37
+0100:
> we have witnessed 3 great migrations of coders
> 1) The migration from Assembly to C/C++ and other high level
languages
> 2) The migration from C++ as the dominant force of coding to Java
> 3) The migration from static types languages to dynamic typed
languages
that's a great observation! and you are right, dynamic typed
languages have won
and smalltalk and lisp had it right all along.
> On the matter of python getting optional static typing I can say
this and
> predict this, static type will never become anywhere as big for
python as
> generic types are in static type languages and I say that
because I have a
> good understanding of the python culture.
that's a good point too. what i am interested in is the fact that
having types
available in these languages, research can finally look for
conclusive evidence
of how much advantage types really give, because all other
differences between
eg python and c++ are eliminated.
i simply do not believe that any findings about types, by
comparing python with
c++ is valid because they are such different beasts of languages.
greetings, martin.
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