It's true, Smalltalk faces the same dilemma as Linux and Lisp. As a /family/
of languages, portability is a genuine issue.
There's no getting around this dichotomy. You can have either a flexibility
of choice or the tyranny of one standard, but not both.
The decision is a fact of life that we face frequently. You can have either
the flexibility of dynamic typing or the safety of static typing, but not
both. You can have either the natural modelling of the real world due to
state mutation or the mathematical safety of immutability, but not both. You
can have either the portability of a virtual machine or the
close-to-the-metal performance of native code generation, but not both (JIT
compilation notwithstanding).
Life is about choices. There will always be a place for different
technologies. Smalltalk will not always be the ideal choice. That's why
there are five entirely different languages that dominate our industry
(Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, C++).
There is no reason why there can't be a sixth, especially if it can
dramatically improve our productivity and make programming less cognitively
stressful. Surely, that's worth fighting for.
Enough?
Richard O'Keefe wrote
Here is a challenge: What is "Smalltalk"?
VAST, VW, and Pharo are quite different environments.
To the extent that they share a common syntax (which
they don't, quite), fine, but porting nontrivial
code between them is NOT easy. They certainly have
very little in common as GUI kits. All praise and
thanks to the people who *have* ported stuff.
On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 01:05, Richard Kenneth Eng <
horrido.hobbies@
>
wrote:
https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/08/10/smalltalks-successor/
A bold claim. It'll be interesting to see if anybody challenges me on
this.
--
Sent from:
http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html