Thanks for that Kirk - quite interesting.

What do you mean by:
"They did so
> because management failed to recognized that they needed to loosen the
> reigns and let people have access in the same what that others were
> starting to do at the time."

A bit more?

(smalltalk fascinates me both as tech and as history - I am sure you
could talk for hours and people like me would still have questions).


On Sep 30, 6:57 am, kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm a little late on this thread but being an old Smalltalker I do have
> some insight into the problems that lead to it's falling out of grace. I
> think there were many. First the old VM technology was much slower than
> stuff written in C/C++. Secondly the language it's self is bizzare if
> you consider where the vast majority of programmers come from. I know
> that shops didn't particularly care for the problems that came with C++.
> However moving to something as foreign as Smalltalk just wasn't an
> option.  Developer seats were expensive and once you picked an
> implementation you were locked in. When Java came along it was a natural
> bridge between C++ and Smalltalk. C/C++ people could still code the way
> they were used to coding. Development shops were also nervous about
> Smalltalk coming from a few very small companies. ParcPlace was
> vulnerable and that eventually did it in.. just about the time that Java
> adoption was starting to take off. So although one might blame Java for
> Smalltalks fall, I think it was coming anyways. Sure IBM jumping in on
> the bandwagon gave it some legitimacy however....
>
> I worked for GemStone for a number of years. IMHO GemStone failed in the
> EJB market (even though they had many years of application server
> experience in Smalltalk and some time in Java) primarly because they
> couldn't make the cultural sift from Smalltalk to Java. WebLogic kicked
> "our" asses not because they were better, they weren't. They did so
> because management failed to recognized that they needed to loosen the
> reigns and let people have access in the same what that others were
> starting to do at the time. Again, this is an over simplification.
>
> Regards,
> Kirk
>
> Hamlet D'Arcy wrote:
> > A guy named James Foster just presented last week at a group I belong
> > to. His talk called "The Seaside Heresy" was video recorded and posted
> > (it's a bit long):http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/video/
>
> > He's from Gemstone, but the talk is about Smalltalk and Seaside (the
> > web framework). It's very cool to see the edit-and-continue
> > capabilities of Smalltalk played out in a web framework. When testing
> > your webapp from the browser, an exception puts you in a debugger, at
> > which point you can edit the code (not just variable values!), pop the
> > stack frame and continue rendering in the browser where you left off.
> > Very cool.
>
> > This is an interesting post about Smalltalk too, called What's Good
> > about 
> > Smalltalk:http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/knight/blogView?showComments...
>
> > On Sep 29, 6:01 am, "Mark Volkmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Mark Derricutt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >>> You can just run squeak in headless mode by added the -headless command 
> >>> line
> >>> parameter.
>
> >> I've tried that, but haven't been able to get it to work. Can you
> >> email me an example command along with the content of an example .st
> >> file you pass to the command that works for you? You can send it to me
> >> off list at r.mark.volkmann at gmail dot com.
>
> >> Thanks!
>
> >>> If you want to connect to this server with a GUI, you can
> >>> install the RFB package (Remote Frame Buffer -
> >>>http://map.squeak.org/package/d4f692a8-c7fa-4d49-927f-74aba7e8fd83)
>
> >>> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Mark Volkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >>> wrote:
>
> >>>> The biggest issue seems to be finding an easy way to run a Smalltalk
> >>>> application from outside the Squeak environment. It seems that the
> >>>> proponents of it feel it is acceptable to have users run applications
>
> >> --
> >> R. Mark Volkmann
> >> Object Computing, Inc.
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