Dolphin Smalltalk Goes Open-Source | Hacker News Reader

Dolphin Smalltalk Goes Open-Source

object-arts.com

106 pointsmpweiher14 comments

MIT License listed at the github site. Had some Smalltalk using friends who really liked it.

Back in 2007, they refused to open the source, I think the authors just hated(!) the open source movement. Why so sudden change?

8-9 years isn't sudden.

I mean I know it feels like yesterday if you don't stop to think about it.

That depends on how old one is, I suppose. ;)

They actually said they'd be perfectly happy to open source it, provided they were paid:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080514032748/http://www.object...

I imagine that the value would have depreciated enormously in the nine years since then. I wonder if someone actually bought out the source, or whether they just gave up?

Well done. Dolphin ST is an excellent product.

How does this compare to Pharo?

One of the major differences is that the Pharo VM is crossplatform (Linux, Windows and OSX), while the Dolphin VM only runs on Windows.

Dolphin's aimed at traditional app development --- you can use it to produce standalone native-look-and-feel apps which you can deploy separately from the IDE. (Although I suspect that what you get is a minified VM image and a runtime rather than true offline compilation.)

I believe it has a decent following in banking and stockbroking environments, presumably because Smalltalk's traditionally good at RAD and it lets them knock out database frontends very quickly. Certainly, whenever you hear actual customers talk about it, they all seem to like it.

should programming languages evolve

its nice to have FOSS implementations of things like smalltalk

but shouldnt we look more forward to languages such as rust, perl 6, go, red .... or at least ocaml and haskell

is this useful for anything beyond legacy systems?

Old doesn't necessarily mean bad. Smalltalk is almost unique - the only thing I'd really compare it to would be Erlang, and that's only at an underlying level.

I have one word for you: Seaside.

Stuff done in smalltalk still manages to stay far ahead of everything else. Most of our intranet stuff runs it, simply because doing simple form-sumbission stuff with many pages is so much faster and simpler to smash out in seaside.

The only downside is that people have started getting used to the backbutton actually working when doing stuff like that online.

> should programming languages evolve

Smalltalk is more a syntax for lambda calculus and objects than a language; the language is all in the library which means it's constantly evolving. I don't have to wait for new versions of Smalltalk because I can add anything I want to it at any time. Smalltalk isn't legacy, it's just not popular; those are entirely different things.

From http://object-arts.com/

"It’s fairly clear that huge systems cannot be created using static typing. It’s just not feasible to assume that whenever a small type change is made, all other components that reference this type will be able to be recompiled."

"cannot be made"? really? heh.

"The World Wide Web is one such massive system that relies on dynamic binding at runtime in order to maintain flexibility and practicality.

As we look to build increasingly large software systems we shouldn’t just rely on this one endeavour to validate Smalltalk’s rejection of static typing. In nature we find systems that are orders of magnitude larger than any of the software we have succeeded in building so far. A biological ecosystem is composed of many organisms, each of which is made up of organs, then cells, then organelles and macromolecules - all towering atop the fundamental building blocks of molecules and atoms. All of these subsystems are dynamically bound together. At each level, elements will handle valid messages from their neighbours and safely reject messages that are, for whatever reason, not understood. In nature there is no compile time validation. In nature there is no compiler."

Sounds very kool-aid-ey to me.

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