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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free.

Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free.

It's kinda the playbook for being a superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.

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Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE (don't forget Instruments and an iOS simulator!) and give it away for free. Problem solved.

> Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE

You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html

Not so much if you want to do any iOS work.

If doing iOS work isn't worth five dollars to you, than how much you can be said to "want" to do it is up for debate.

I get the impression everybody is preaching to the choir here for the most part.

Yes, the solution to you not willing to pay $5 is for someone else to invest hundrends of thousands of dollars (at programmer's market pay) to re-implement XCode.

I do develop open-source software (SumatraPDF) and give it away for free, but this kind of attitude of entitlement always gets me.

My point exactly. Although if someone really does want to re-implement Xcode, more power to them I say! Me, I'll pay the 5 bucks.

This is a lot harder than just paying $4.99 for Xcode, but I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt GNUstep's developer tools to Cocoa development.

How about a bunch of us pay $5 to do that? Kickstarter project?

JetBrains is working on an IDE for Cocoa developer and guess what it wont cost 5 bucks thats for sure.

http://www.jetbrains.com/cidr/

> Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool

That's one hell of an understatement...

That's one hell of an understatement...

I just want to relate the experience, not start a flame war. Java tools are pretty darn cool nowadays.

Still, Smalltalk is seriously cool.

I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.

Version control also seemed an issue - commercial Smalltalks had tools like Envy - but all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).

Okay, I'll bite. "Amish Bread Syndrome"? The Googles do nothing.

http://www.armchair.com/recipe/bake002.html

The Googles lead me to Amish Friendship Bread, which requires a starter that you have to get from someone else. Thus, without the starter you can't compile your bread from sources. At least, that's the best I can come up with in three minutes. :)

all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Envy had a few pathologies, but I think there were pathologies in the projects as well.

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