Club Squeak

Ramon Leon makes some good points about the “out of the box” Squeak UI and I agree that marketing is important. However, like most folk relatively new to Smalltalk/Squeak and strangely many who’ve been around a long time, he’s been misinformed about why Smalltalk isn’t more widely used. Smalltalk was not beaten by either Java or Ruby, but rather failed to address the needs these languages did in a timely manner. It may be a while before I find time to finish up the long, detailed essay on this topic that’s been sitting dormant so for now let me put it in a nutshell.

It is a matter of record that Java was not originally designed to compete with Smalltalk as a generic application development tool, but rather C/C++ for set top devices. Before Java’s public release, the momentum in the corporate world had clearly shifted to Smalltalk over C++. Java wasn’t publicly released until 1995 and early in the year didn’t even enter into the language discussion. Nor was Java mentioned when Digitalk and ParcPlace merged later that year. In fact, at the end of 1995, IBM which had only recently licensed Java was still touting VisualAge over Java for the web! At the time the Java Enterprise Edition Platform spec was announced in 1998, none of the incompatible Smalltalk offerings from a stagnant ParcPlace-Digitalk, an indifferent IBM, a research-oriented Squeak, or single platform Object-Arts was really focused on delivering internet aware solutions. Java and Ruby merely stepped in and filled a vacuum.

Update:  It is true that ParcPlace-Digitalk’s VisualWave was a powerful offering in some respects. However, it was an expensive and all-encompassing approach with no free stepping stones or incremental building blocks. In contrast, Java developers could download the JDK, explore and learn.

When you look at the 35 languages that rank above Smalltalk on the TIOBE Index(also relevant is O’Reilly’s Programming Language Trends ), marketing doesn’t really seem to be a primary differentiator. If one is seeking to expand the use of Smalltalk, I think it’s necessary to broaden the context ultimately to include the evolution of hardware and also give more weight to it’s ancestral meme. Many of the languages ranked ahead of Smalltalk owe a great deal of their success to ideas made popular by Smalltalk. Things that can be done to achieve more widespread use of Smalltalk will be the topic of my next “Smalltalk Reloaded” entry but I’ll say in closing that embracing Sun Labs Lively Kernel is one of them.