🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <31684F33.2528@ibm.net>, Ernie Wright <javaguy@ibm.net> wrote:

>You beg the question regarding why those who like JAVA may have failed 
>to "master" Smalltalk and C++.....for example, which flavor of Smalltalk
>and which flavor of C++ are you the "master" of?  If you work on JAVA 
>you can be certain that you know the language.

This in turn begs the question of whether just knowing the language in
question is enough. There is a flip side of "Time to market". This is
"maturity at time of marketing." Smalltalks do vary from implementation to
implementation at the level of user interface support, but at the same
time they all share a remarkable level of portability at what we call the
Common Language Data Type level in IBM Smalltalk. And this level provides
more function than what is provided at the language level of either Java
or C++. This portability is in large part due to the fact that Smalltalk
allows reuse without requiring inheritance of varying implementations.
Smalltalk also had the benefit of being used for many years before it was
widely available and therefore not having to 'grow up' in the intense
arena generated by the frenzy accorded C++ and now to an even larger
extent Java.

Both C++ and Java were released largely just as languages. Then everyone
went off and built different and incompatible class libraries. Strong
typing makes it hard to combine such separate efforts, although even
dynamic typing can't solve the problems of incompatible designs. There was
an interesting OOPSLA paper many years ago by Lucy Berlin, called "When
Objects Collide" which touches on these difficulties in a Lisp based
system, a language which is at least as dynamic as Smalltalk. Smalltalk
does quite well with replacing a round metal peg with a wooden one, and it
does make it a little easier to make a square-peg to round-hole converter,
but it doesn't make the latter that easy, and it isn't always possible for
all shape combinations if you see the analogy.

It doesn't bode well for the ultimate fate of a language when important
things that people want to do with the language aren't provided in
standard ways in the language. This is one of the reasons that we don't
have Pascal to kick around much anymore, one of the reasons that C took
over Pascal's predominant place as a personal computer programming
language is that Pascal left any kind of reasonable I/O as an exercise to
the reader, and there was no common way of doing it, while C's (actually
Unix's) stdio package was easily supported on most of the common operating
systems.

And just what is Java anyway? As I understand it, much of the Java
excitement is really about using it to build thin clients by extending Web
Browsers (as if we will really get thin clients based on things like
Netscape, have you seen what kind of resources it requires?).  This really
means JavaScript, which as I understand it is Java-like, but isn't really
compatible with Java. Yes, I know that this could probably be rectified,
but it's hard to get the horses back in the barn.

>How do you think JAVA will fare when it has 16 years under its belt like
>Smalltalk, really.......look how fast this is happening, aren't at least
>interested in it since you are in this forum?

But Smalltalk has really had more than 24 years under it's belt, and has
only really been widely available for less than half of that time.  It had
a chance to mature and become coherent and mature in a nurturing
environment before it had to face the cold cruel world.

So my advice to proponents of Java would be to keep it under the control
of an inspired small group who ensure that it has a strong enough suite of
standard classes before releasing it to the eager but unruly masses.

Oops! it's already too late for that.

>Just a few thoughts from...
>
>The javaguy@ibm.net

Just a few thoughts from ...

A Senior Smalltalk Wizard from IBM.
Whose thoughts are his alone and don't represent those of IBM although he
does his inadequate best to influence them, as if IBM had one mind anyway,
and who tells you what he does for a living so that you can take these
comments for what they are worth, and in the context of who utters them.

-- 
Rick DeNatale
Still looking for a cool signature ;-)