Am 12.08.20 um 06:28 schrieb Richard O'Keefe:
The contrast between "flexibility of choice" and "tyranny of one
standard" is, um, a little over-drawn. I have three different Common
Lisp systems on this laptop: CMUCL, SBCL, and CCL. I have the
flexibility of choice between them *because* the adhere to a common
standard. Each of them has its own extra bits, but I am free to choose
between them because everything *else* is not idiosyncratic.
Very true.
Software tends to form high stacks with many layers of dependencies.
Productive work on any given layer requires stability in the layers
below. But if anyone depends on *your* work, that's a constraint on your
freedom to innovate.
Smalltalk today is in the same situation as Scheme (but unlike Common
Lisp): there are more people interested in evolving Smalltalk than
people building applications on top of Smalltalk. And that makes
Smalltalk unattractive for those application builders for whom the
progress in the quality of their tools is not worth the cost of the
diversity and instability that require constant attention. It all
depends on what you are working on, and in particular on the time scale
of evolution of your work. If your application's requirement change
rapidly, it's easier to deal with an unstable platform than if you are
working on a complex design to be used over decades.
Konrad.
