Interesting to see this. Smalltalk blew my mind coming off of a C and Java background. Everything from the development environment to dynamic variables to sparseness of syntax was just amazing to experience for the first time. It was one of the most enjoyable languages to program in, and it was poised to take over cooperate fat client programming. That was until java and the internet exploded onto the seen and pretty much killed it off. Is it poetic justice that it's revived on the JVM?
It's especially poetic given that the HotSpot vm that was purchased by Sun, and developed by Anamorphic ('Animorphic' in some articles) Systems, was originally designed to run Smalltalk / Self.
> A few months back, I went to a demo at Parc of the Xerox Star (I first saw
> the Star in '81 at NCC). It was real interesting to be reminded that
> hardware has improved a few orders of magnitude in the last 17 years, but
> software mabey hasn't improved very much. So what can we do to get back on
> track for the next decade or two? In 20 years will software be 40 years
> behind hardware? Or will software be dramatically better than it is now.
I often find this sad, especially when thinking about software and systems that died on the vine in the past few decades. I remember fast, efficient systems running on processors of a few hundred megahertz, using 5400RPM disks, and a fraction of a GB of RAM. Why do the same tasks I was performing then take just as long or longer on systems with orders of magnitude more computational power?
But the power of smalltalk is not in the language syntax but in the system as an overall. It will be really interesting to see how far this goes. I'm also very curious to see something similar in the .Net platform. As you, this is one of my favorites languages.
