🚀 go-pugleaf

>A major software company can afford to sell 10,000,000 copies
>for $100 each.  If they only have 1,000 customers, they go broke
>at this price...  These guys are not totally dumb.  Also, it is
>_expensive_ and _hard_ to make things easy-to-use - ask any
>application developer!  (I have been one for 30 years.  Sheese...)

This is sort of twisted logic.  If they did sell it for less, they
would definitely get more users.  Do you take the profit hit now? or
the the 30 year?

Also, easy to use apps are NOT hard to develop, only hard in VW.  VB
lets you create easy to use applications with no hassle.  Try creating
drag and drop support in VW with 3 lines of code...maybe, now try to
do it without "drag droppings" that are left on your screen from
moving the icon around.   NOT

>> Why are there expensive runtimes?

>A way to keep the initial development costs down, and let you
>pay the rest when _you_ have revenue coming in.  (This has always
>been a controversial point - not all Smalltalk vendors do this -
>but would you rather pay _more_ initially?  Smalltalk is not a
>cheap product to maintain, enhance, and market.  You should see
>the list of new features that people want!  :-)

Unfortunately, this hasn't kept the initial cost down.  And even
vendors in the ST community have violated this "logical" reasoning.
VisualSmalltalk is cheap (as cheap as any other quality compiler) and
doesn't have runtime fees.  VisualWorks costs a couple of grand and
does have runtime fees.  What's up with that?

>> Why is there no portable standard?

>The Smalltalk language is completely portable among all major
>vendors and platforms. (Alright, there are - or were - a few minor
>gotchas like declaring local variables inside blocks, but compared
>to C and C++, this is nothing.  Also, the new standards will
>eventually take care of this.)  What really kills portability in
>Smalltalk is the differences in class libraries, and C++ certainly
>shares this problem.  :-(

Smalltalk is as portable, not more or less than C, straight ANSI C.
You CANNOT file a class in from VisualWorks or VW/Envy to Visual
Smalltalk, there are no protocols in Visual Smalltalk.  Code that is
optimized in VW may not be in VST.  Some VST methods return different
objects (although these are easy to find in Smalltalk by inspecting)

In ANSI C, if you write pure ANSI, and you compiler is 100% ANSI (all
of these are common things), your code is completely portable with no
changes!


Despite how it may seem, I am a Smalltalk proponent.  It is one of the
easiest, most powerful languages ever invented and truly revolutionary
at the time.  But as with anything else, it must continue to grow and
adapt and evolve and change to be usefull.  This has not been the
case, especially for VW.  When I pay a couple of K for a language, I
don't expect to have to write ANYTHING to get my editor working, I
don't care if I have the source code!

The next step in software development will happen when languages like
C++ and VB incorporate the techniques used by ST, and indeed this slow
end to ST has already begun.
--
Cat...the other white meat.