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Comment by mbrodersen | Hacker News Reader

Anybody here using Smalltalk in production?

At Yesplan [1] we use GemStone in production, we use Pharo for development. The languages are quite alike, but we do need to have a compatibility layer between the two. For example, GemStone doesn't have dynamic arrays (arrays that evaluate expressions of each element).

Our CTO knows companies that use Pharo in production. I'm sure there are also people using VisualWorks in production. All of these languages are Smalltalk descendants.

[1] http://yesplan.be

Would you say Smalltalk is a competitive advantage?

Not for hiring. In terms of programming, in terms of programmer motivation yes. Not sure in terms of actual effectiveness.

When you hire someone with experience in an esoteric or obscure language, there is a reasonable chance the person really likes learning esoteric or obscure languages. This is usually a plus.

Yeah, I’ve programmed (not professionally) quite a bit in the various free Smalltalks and from a purely development perspective I could easily see it as a competitive advantage. The big question I would have is performance of the VMs and images under load but I guess that would fall under premature optimization. I imagine horizontal scaling or transitioning to Gemstone when needed would be the answer.

The productivity that a handful of good smalltalkers can achieve to solve complex systems is off the charts.

The strongest thing that Smalltalk has is that you'll feel really powerful to deal with changes in the rules of scenarios that are high in complexity. So speed in adapting to change fast is what I see as its most valuable trait.

> The productivity that a handful of good smalltalkers can achieve to solve complex systems is off the charts.

You could say that of any experts in any system. They will be extremely productive.

There is really nothing special about Smalltalk that makes its developers automatically more productive (especially not the IDE, which is vastly outclassed today by the likes of IDEA, XCode, and Visual Studio).

Sounds you're asking for an old-school good team competition.

If only the likes of IDEA, XCode, and Visual Studio were able to do hot-reload and REPL based development like Smalltalk was doing in the mid-80's.

But no, the occasional oops need to rebuild the world, still happens.

Depending what you (incidentally) change in Smalltalk you also have to recompile all methods.

Indeed, however that is transparent to the user, the current IDE experience would be similar to getting out of Smalltalk and restarting it from scratch.

Being fair, that's not a typical need with code at application level.

These IDE's have been able to do this for 20+ years.

And they also do so much more than the rrb.

Do they haven't, not at the level that Smalltalk does it.

To affirm otherwise only reveals lack of experience on the matter.

No Smalltalk environment has ever shown an error message about not being able to do edit-continue/hot-reload/whatever.... after doing a code change in a debug session.

Nor are they capable of transparently exposing their internal structures in the debugging session.

Can you halt and open an interactive debugger in a green thread in a running production node that you can correct a method and let that thread continue running after that with these? Without interrupting any other thread of that node of course?

Yes and yes. On the JVM and .net. Has been feasible for a while.

It's also something that you should probably never do, so not really that useful or worth considering as a major advantage.

On the JVM only if you buy JRebel and even then there are situations where it doesn't work.

https://www.jrebel.com/blog/limitations-of-hotswap

https://www.jrebel.com/learn/does-jrebel-support-my-framewor...

On the .NET, I will let Microsoft's own words speak for itself,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-hot-re...

> No matter how you use .NET Hot Reload please be aware that some changes are not supported at runtime and will prompt you with a rude edit dialog and require you to restart your app in order to apply. We’re still working on the feature and the documentation to detail what edits are supported. For now, start by reviewing our existing list of Edit and Continue (EnC) equivalent capabilities. Since Hot Reload is powered by EnC this will give you a good starting point for better understanding this new feature. For details see: EnC documentation.

In Smalltalk environments since the early 80's, it always works, there are no buts and ifs, or extra products to install.

As mentioned on another replies, it only shows you never used Smalltalk in production.

> there are no buts and ifs, or extra products to install.

So... moving the goal posts now.

Smalltalk is image based right? So how do you merge changes from different team members?

Like everything else, with a source control system that is image aware, like Monticello.

https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1287

Most Smaltalk implementations have such tooling in place, that is just a possible one.

Nowadays there's Iceberg, which is integrated with git :)

In a previous job I worked on the case management software used by the Norwegian police. It was first put into production in ‘96, based on an earlier system from I think ‘94 (thus the Smalltalk). All criminal complaints in Norway pass through this system.

As a developer, I found the system really nice to work on, despite an antiquated Smalltalk implementation at the base (end of lifed in ‘99). Since the IDE is integrated into the running application, the development process was extremely smooth for a desktop application like that. But the process was an acquired taste, not all the developers got into the groove.

These guys do:

https://www.etas.com/en/company/news-archive-2018-28208.php

Yes. At https://telna.com/ we have it in a backend that in last july it was helping to route half petabyte of network traffic and is expected to reach 1 PB by the end of this year.

Yes, in the early nineties; learned me to appreciate static typing and avoid image based languages.

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