<story><title>What Killed Smalltalk?</title><url>http://pointersgonewild.com/2015/08/20/what-killed-smalltalk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notdeadSTer</author><text>I generally like Uncle Bob, but he isn&amp;#x27;t a Smalltalker and didn&amp;#x27;t demonstrate any insight into Smalltalk&amp;#x27;s unpopularity in that talk.&lt;p&gt;Worse, this is hardly the first or only time a prominent Rubyist ignorant of Smalltalk has publicly attacked it. Sarah Mei did so in a talk two years ago, mocking it for not having any conferences of its own (ESUG, Pharo Days, and Smalltalks apparently don&amp;#x27;t count), and she and Steve Klabnik recently had fun tweeting anti-Smalltalk quips back-and-forth.&lt;p&gt;Given that most of the non-awful stuff (where &amp;quot;awful&amp;quot; means, for example, syntax too complicated to be described by a CF grammar or horrible performance) they like about Ruby was lifted directly from Smalltalk, you&amp;#x27;d expect Rubyists to be extremely deferential and respectful towards Smalltalk and Smalltalkers, but they aren&amp;#x27;t. Instead they&amp;#x27;re arrogant and condescending despite being ignorant, validating all of the well-earned stereotypes of Rubyists.&lt;p&gt;As for why Smalltalk &amp;quot;died&amp;quot; (cf. pharo.org) I would say it was too expensive, both in licensing terms and hardware costs. You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk. Some vendors would charge (and still charge) a percentage of your revenue forever, which is insane. Then Java came along, and it was free.&lt;p&gt;Smalltalk also missed out on the open source revolution, not having viable libre implementations (Pharo, GNU) until relatively recently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tloewald</author><text>I suspect it was performance, cruft, and aesthetics that killed it more than price. After all, expensive things that get popular generally become cheaper (or have cheaper versions released).&lt;p&gt;My experience with SmallTalk was that by the time it had any chance of uptake it was already knee-deep in cruft (e.g. multiple overlapping visual class hierarchies that would be mixed and matched within projects to devastatingly awful effect).&lt;p&gt;In my experience (admittedly mostly dealing with IBM and IBM-sanctioned vendors) a typical Smalltalk demo was a program that ran 10x slower than VB on a computer with twice as much memory (and at least as good a CPU) as anyone other than a Smalltalk coder had.&lt;p&gt;And Smalltalk programs tended to look awful and not be easily fixed (because of the overlapping cruft issue).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that Rubyists are no more ignorant of Smalltalk than Smalltalkers are of Simula.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Killed Smalltalk?</title><url>http://pointersgonewild.com/2015/08/20/what-killed-smalltalk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notdeadSTer</author><text>I generally like Uncle Bob, but he isn&amp;#x27;t a Smalltalker and didn&amp;#x27;t demonstrate any insight into Smalltalk&amp;#x27;s unpopularity in that talk.&lt;p&gt;Worse, this is hardly the first or only time a prominent Rubyist ignorant of Smalltalk has publicly attacked it. Sarah Mei did so in a talk two years ago, mocking it for not having any conferences of its own (ESUG, Pharo Days, and Smalltalks apparently don&amp;#x27;t count), and she and Steve Klabnik recently had fun tweeting anti-Smalltalk quips back-and-forth.&lt;p&gt;Given that most of the non-awful stuff (where &amp;quot;awful&amp;quot; means, for example, syntax too complicated to be described by a CF grammar or horrible performance) they like about Ruby was lifted directly from Smalltalk, you&amp;#x27;d expect Rubyists to be extremely deferential and respectful towards Smalltalk and Smalltalkers, but they aren&amp;#x27;t. Instead they&amp;#x27;re arrogant and condescending despite being ignorant, validating all of the well-earned stereotypes of Rubyists.&lt;p&gt;As for why Smalltalk &amp;quot;died&amp;quot; (cf. pharo.org) I would say it was too expensive, both in licensing terms and hardware costs. You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk. Some vendors would charge (and still charge) a percentage of your revenue forever, which is insane. Then Java came along, and it was free.&lt;p&gt;Smalltalk also missed out on the open source revolution, not having viable libre implementations (Pharo, GNU) until relatively recently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>igouy</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk in the 80s or 90s.&amp;lt;&amp;lt;&lt;p&gt;Different Smalltalk implementations, different prices:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=wJswszKTwl4C&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA43&amp;amp;lpg=RA1-PA43&amp;amp;dq=digitalk+smalltalk&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=SugTPceBnI&amp;amp;sig=zqNnQvhFkVy5_jufBts_MKtd9-Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=_lx5VJrUJcX4igLj-oHgAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=digitalk%20smalltalk&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=wJswszKTwl4C&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA43&amp;amp;l...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;Then Java came along, and it was free.&amp;lt;&amp;lt;&lt;p&gt;Free and The-Future-of-the-Internet TM.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;There is an important technical &amp;#x2F; licensing &amp;#x2F; business problem with Smalltalk that has not been mentioned -- lack of library standardization.&lt;p&gt;Apart from a few core classes, each Smalltalk implementation had different class names and method names for things that once-upon-a-time were special but quickly became commonplace -- like windows and menus and …&lt;p&gt;So you could never hire a &amp;quot;Smalltalk&amp;quot; developer: you hired a VW developer or a Smalltalk&amp;#x2F;V developer or a VA developer and waited for them to get up to speed with an unfamiliar environment.</text></comment>