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Comment by cmeiklejohn | Hacker News Reader

Can you extrapolate on this?

If I have a Smalltalk VM and I'm only talking to other Smalltalk VMs then a native Smalltalk solution without the foolishness of using CORBA is preferable. Its just an insane bit of added plumbing.

Having at least your interfaces defined in something resembling DCE IDL can give a useful amount of confidence that the system could plausibly interop with something else. (RPC, COM, etc.)

First, its something you don't need at the start (and frankly they didn't need for at least a decade), and it not only complicates the code, it also complicates the maintenance and support burden. Interop is probably going to be some other mechanism and should be done only when you need it and have a clear understanding of what actually needs to be done.

One can call anything "an insane bit of added plumbing" if it's truly not needed, but that doesn't add much to a discussion of distributed applications.

I think it speaks to the complication people add to distributed applications when something like CORBA is on the table without an actual evaluation if it is really needed. It is most definitely not the only solution.

The entire point of CORBA was interop, so it's a bit absurd to say it wasn't actually needed, no?

About 4 years ago, I needed a car to drive into the ground that got good gas mileage. I got a pretty good deal on a Kia Rio and I drove it 100 miles a day and it was good on gas and low maintenance. It is just me, so room wasn't an issue.

I suppose I could have bought a Cadillac Escalade and spent a lot more on gas and maintenance while being able to haul a lot of people which would of never happened. It also would have cost quite a bit more than my Rio.

So, its not absurd to buy a Kia if it meets your needs instead of an Escalade, quite the opposite in fact. Just as it is really foolish to use CORBA when all you really need are the facilities already included with most Smalltalks. Just because I'm doing communications doesn't mean I need the big, expensive solution.

Agreed, and that's why Distributed Erlang works the way it does.

However, it's unfair to criticize CORBA for one of it's design tenets. It was designed for interop, hence the name.

Many solutions for transparent distribution were around the same time as Smalltalk. Look at systems like Eden, Emerald, etc.

I think its totally fair to criticize something, especially if it is part of its design tenets. Just because they designed it for interop doesn't mean I cannot evaluate it for the situation I am in. I've never been one for programming dogma. If I was using NeXTSTEP only at the time, CORBA would never have come up because of PDO.

Well, this is basically the story of Distributed Erlang, which does this out of the box transparently.

PDO on NeXTSTEP was also quite good. I haven't really looked, but I'm pretty sure it survives in mac os.

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