Hi!
On 04/30/2014 10:02 PM, kilon alios wrote:
Another mistake is that people tend to over idealising Smalltalk and it
appears as if Smalltalk used to be popular, but I have found no evidence
that Smalltalk was ever popular. Again I may be wrong but this is also
maybe a motivation to regard Smalltalk dead.
It was quite popular in... 1985-ish to 1995-ish. I would guess that
during those years VisualWorks and VisualAge (primarily) covered 33% of
the OOP market and C++ about 60% - and the rest by other even smaller
things like Eiffel. Those numbers I recall from some magazine, so I am
not making them up. If you were into OO at the time it was quite a lot
of buzz around both Smalltalk and C++ IMHO.
But OOP was almost exclusively used in large corporations or
institutions that could muster the licenses. But Smalltalk *was* fairly
big and some truly huge systems were built.
But it was not in any serious awareness outside the corporate world -
since there was hardly any cheap or free Smalltalk available. C++ was
though and ate up that space, and of course...
...you know what came in 1995. :)
If say... Dolphin had been born as an open source (or at least gratis
download) project - so that people could easily build Win32 apps for
consumer use, like VB or Deplhi... then perhaps the world had been
different.
regards, Göran
