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Comment by senozhatsky | Hacker News Reader

I wonder - what do people who used to code in Smalltalk think of "modern" languages. Like Golang, Rust, etc.

-ss

Some of us still use Smalltalk, as you might imagine (the language is hardly in the top 10 but is far from dead). Dan Ingalls, the author of that article, has been using Javascript for the past decade or so to create a Smalltalk-like environment called Lively Kernel. L Peter Deutsch gave a talk many years ago about why Python had replaced Smalltalk as his favorite language (I can no longer find the talk on the Internet). David Ungar (who co-created the Smalltalk On A RISC, SOAR, chip and the Self language) seems to be focused on Swift.

You have a great memory. Thanks for the pointers, very educational.

-ss

We stick to our Java and .NET development environments, the only ones close enough to the experience.

Oh, that's interesting indeed! Thanks. I speak zero Smalltalk (I must read a "Smalltalk book" after all), but somehow I expected to see C++ on the list, simply because Stroustrup said in his TC++PL book that Smalltalk has influenced C++ a lot. Do you think that Java and .Net are closer to Smalltalk than C++?

-ss

The only C++ environments that kind of came close to it were Lucid C++ and C++ Builder.

Java and .NET are based on VM with mixed execution models, interpreted, AOT and JIT to native code.

Their semantic model is closer to Smalltalk, with GC, dynamic loading, incremental compilation, ability to change code in debug mode and continue, reflection, dynamically generate bytecode on the fly, ....

Thanks a ton, very interesting. I heard of Borland C++ Builder (never had a chance to try it out tho), have never heard of Lucid C++.

BTW I just found out that, apparently, C++ Builder is, sort of, still alive. The most recent release is "10.2 Tokyo / March 22, 2017". I thought it was dead for a decade or so.

-ss

Search for Lucid C++ demo on YouTube.

Currently on mobile, not so easy to provide a link.

No worries, I think I found it

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

That's awesome.

-ss

Can you expand on that? I would never have expected to see Smalltalk being compared with Java. They really seem worlds apart.

If anything, among more "modern" languages, I would think that the closest thing to Smalltalk is Ruby.

EDIT: Here's an example piece of code of Smalltalk:

    #(1 2 3 4 5) select: [:i| i odd ]

in the equivalent Ruby:

    [1,2,3,4,5].select {|i| i.odd? }

As a language, Ruby is closer to Smalltalk than Java or C# are.

But for overall development experience, modern industrial C# and Java developer environments may be closer to the Smalltalk dev experience.

You are only focused on the language grammar, instead of the full development experience.

This is what most people miss when comparing languages.

Even then, I heard Smalltalk development was like Lisp, with the ability to do incremental compilation / image based development where you initiate an image that represents a process with built-in, generic saving functionality and the ability to edit the code while it runs. You could start an image, run it, build the program as it runs, save it, restart the computer, and continue the image so it runs from the point it was saved. Here's some online documentation that describes that[1].

There's also REPLs for Smalltalk, but none for Java due to it's syntactic structure that prevents top-level statements.

That sounds like Smalltalk leads to far different development experiences compared to Java.

In other words, I can't think of how anything between Smalltalk and Java could be similar (at least more so than comparing it to any other programming language). Could you expand on that?

[1] http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/musings/SmalltalkOverview.htm...

Eclipse originated from Visual Age for Smalltalk.

To this day it still contains the Smalltalk style code browser for Java code. REPL like experience in Eclipse was done via Scrapbook, which are similar to transcripts.

And as of Java 9 there is an official REPL on the JDK.

The workspace concept in Eclipse is based on the idea of having a kind of virtual image based on files.

JVM debugging capabilities support edit and continue, then there are tools like JRebel that take advantage of class loaders to extend the code replacement capabilities.

Eclipse has its own Java compiler that does incremental compilation on file save.

Java collections introduced in version 1.2 are influenced by Smalltalk collection classes.

Also note that I didn't state it was the same thing, rather "the only ones close enough to the experience.".

Thanks for the reply. This is all very interesting.

> Eclipse has its own Java compiler that does incremental compilation on file save.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the other kind of incremental compilation, different from Smalltalk's or Lisp's. As far as I can see, it simply results in faster compilation, and not in run-time program modification.

Run-time program modification is possible, to a certain extent, when debugging or using libraries like JRebel, which I mentioned.

Again I am not saying you can do everything that Smalltalk allows for, after all it enjoys the flexibility of a dynamic language, just that those environments (.NET and Java) are the closest to the overall experience, from the point of view of someone that used Smalltalk/V back in its golden days.

The dynamism of those IDEs can be traced back to what Xerox PARC was doing on their Mesa/Cedar developer's environment.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...

These ideas influenced the IDE experience of other statically typed languages.

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