Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

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One of the things that Allen only barely hints at and I'm not sure Gilads piece really touches on was the shifting economics in Software development. In 1995/96 when Java gut punched the wind out of Smalltalk and the other OO solutions (CLOS, Eifel, Beta, etc), they spent a butt load on marketing and gave the stuff away for free. In other industries it would be called "dumping." It wasn't just Sun giving Java away. It was also the beginning of the rise of Linux, also free. I remember a colleague pointing out "there is no money in tools anymore, there's a few niche islands left, but they'll fail too."

I think neither of these articles aptly covers this counter trend enough. Whilst Smalltalk had come out of the kind of freeish academic research zone with its small band of developers of un-patroned developers trying to eke out a living, the industry was clamoring to free and open source.

What I wouldn't give to have closures that were as simple and robust and approachable as Smalltalk in any of the languages I work in today (Swift, Kotlin, Python, Dart, C).

(Did 20 years of Smalltalk, including 6 years at Cimcom)

Not only did Sun lose a lot of money on Java, they got other people (I remember Borland and IBM but there were probably others) to throw away money for a few critical years. Why the new CEO of the merged ParcPlace/Digitalk thought it would be good idea to abandon the lucrative Smalltalk niche to focus his company on this bloodbath I will probably never know.

https://www.cbronline.com/news/parcplace_throws_in_smalltalk...

ParcPlace hired a CEO who knew how to solve problems by buying and selling companies. It worked for him once or twice (he previously sold Ashton Tate to Borland).

In context - compilers and operating systems used to be expensive. Really, really expensive. Hundreds/thousands of dollars per seat per language expensive, in 80s/90s money.

But what really killed that model wasn't the cost - it was the lack of lock-in.

For comparison, Oracle is still really, really expensive, but its market lock-in means that it won't be overtaken by Postgres for some time yet.

Languages are more disposable. There's significant pain involved in shifting to a different code base, but it's not nearly as painful as trying to extract your data from a proprietary DB that considers lock-in a feature.

That was definitely a major point.

I just read your first paragraph almost verbatim from A Tour of C++[1]! What a joyful coincidence. :)

http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html

>any of the languages I work in today (Swift, Kotlin, Python, Dart, C)

Have you done any work in Ruby?

Just a little.

Did colleges buy into Java through Sun's marketing ? because they felt that it would be a requirement to find a job ?

> the languages I work in today (Swift, Kotlin, Python, Dart, C).

Are you a mobile app developer?

I do embedded on the metal with no or RTOS, in C. Embedded on Linux (think Raspberry pi form factor) with Python and other Linux stuff. At Swift/Kotlin/Dart for mobile apps. A different sort of full stack where we're developing the gadgets and the apps that interface with them through bluetooth.

Interesting! Once you're at Swift and Kotlin, is there any reason to pick up Dart?

As a web dev, I've done Ruby, JavaScript, and Common Lisp; and have dabbled in Dart, Elixir, and now SwiftUI. If I wanted to start building mobile apps, I'm wondering if that would suffice or if I'd have to pick up Kotlin as well.

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