Redline Smalltalk for the JVM | Hacker News Reader

Redline Smalltalk for the JVM

redline.st

33 pointsbrudgers11 comments

Hi there, I'm the creator of Redline and I very much want to complete it but other work and life items have got in the way. I hope to return to it just as soon as I can. - James.

Hey, be proud of what you were able to achieve, and look forward to the day when you can achieve any more.

Smalltalk was and is an amazing tool, one of the 100-year languages (if not, perhaps, one of the 1,000-year languages). The JVM is awfully popular, and will be for awhile. Java stole the steam from what should have been the Smalltalk decades; it's appropriate for there to be a decent Smalltalk on the JVM.

I hope you do; and I want my t-shirt!

Ooo! Something I can comment on!

I fired up Redline a few months ago, attempting to "evaluate it" for a potential work project - day job is writing connectivity solutions for an enterprise search engine using a an in-house Java framework, with actual implementations in both Java and Scala. I used Smalltalk for a few classes in college in the mid-2000s and jumped at the opportunity to see how it went for this little test.

Redline needs some TLC. The basics are there, but it seems like much of the standard library is not yet implemented. It'd be really awesome to see it come up to speed, and I wish I had time to contribute to it myself.

What does the Java interop look like?

AFAICT, it's not really there yet. I could barely make it work within the scope of the framework I was using.

After watching a few Alan Kay talks where he pines for Smalltalk, I happened to watch this Robert Martin talk "What killed Smalltalk could kill Ruby".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0

The tldw reasons he gives for why Smalltalk died:

- too easy to make a mess where adding complexity would be punished late.

- arrogance - community isolated itself from the world and did not address common industry needs

- commercial only - alternative free languages dominated

Maybe related to your third reason, as previously noted, IT-related book publisher and seller O'Reilly appears (open to correction) not to offer one single book about Pharo or Smalltalk.

OTOH, there are a bunch of books out for Squeak, and most old Smalltalk books are still very relevant. (And I'd argue some of the best old Smalltalk books are required reading for people that don't work in Smalltalk.)

Re; Pharo, yeah, there's only a few self-published books.

I don't recall Alan Kay pining specifically for Smalltalk; mostly he just agitates for a world in which people at least understand the big ideas behind the original articulation of OOP. In fact, Kay tried to kill Smalltalk way back in the 70s[1].

[1]: http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insig...

Is it still being developed? I see a funding campaign from 2013 and no recent code commits.

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