> On 20 Jan 2016, at 19:27, Jimmie Houchin <jlhouc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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!
Well spoken! Free software became a business enabler thanks to the web. Back then, there was no web, no ability to build global communities pushing forward a shared artefact. I think that is no coincidence that the oldest language that is still mainstream is C, which was used to build Unix, which was used to build the web. Now, let's do something awesome :-)
