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by wglb
4086 days ago
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Ah, but I think that the comparison doesn't hold. In my opinion, Smalltalk was the right way to do all of what we do, and Java took the enterprise mindset by storm. There was an enormous project at a very large Insurance company near Chicago that was written in Smalltalk, but got abandoned for some obscure reason. I think that Smalltalk has the right level of abstraction and a lot of very good other things about it. MPI was, as the article points out, the wrong abstraction for the problem. If MPI dies, I am ok with that. I am sad that Smalltalk is not more widely used. |
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Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing a bunch of Pointy-Haired Bosses that garbage collection means that you have no memory leaks, as well as that Java was the only way to do cross-platform development.
IMHO Java is one of the very worst ways to do cross-platform, however when I ported a a Mac OS Pascal program to Java so that it could be run on both Windows and Mac, the client was completely convinced that Java was the only way that could possibly be done - this despite my loud and frequent protests that the state of Java at the time was quite poor, that the Java interpreter was dog-slow, that Java sucked the memory dry, and that I knew a whole bunch of ways to write cross-platform native code that would be far faster and use far-less memory.
The reason that Smalltalk specifically suffered from this, is that Sun made most of its money by selling servers to the enterprise. Sun Workstations were favored by scientists and engineers, however Sun's real money came from enterprise servers.
Right around that time, Smalltalk was largely used for enterprise applications. Enterprise application developers loved Smalltalk absolutely to death however the bean counters and the PHBs were more inclined to listen to marketdroids promises about garbage collection being immune to memory leaks.
Garbage collection and memory leaks are orthogonal.