VisualAge for Java 1.0 – Let the Future Begin (1997)

I worked with Erich before Visual Age when he developed the Presentation Framework. He came up with a process identical to XP. When XP came out I realized that Erich and Kent Beck were friends.

Erich is so prolific that he doesn't remember everything he invented. He is also generous.

IBM buying and redirecting OTI to Java yielding eventually Eclipse at the same time boosted Java and pulled the rug from under Smalltalk.

IBM starting to hire Smalltalk programmers from universities and redirecting them to Java.

IBM providing networking stack parts to Java to interoperate in the banking industry.

It all happened over a relatively short period of time. Java was not just cheaper but thanks to IBM the tooling and networking - still way behind the combo of Smalltalk/Envy - was starting to be good enough.

It isn't flashy, but it is still there. Did a project on it in 2016. Not that long ago.

All of the popular 90s RAD design tools dealt with resizing as an afterthought, which made them obsolete in many cases and probably contributed negatively to the reputation of the whole class of software. Today's WYSISYG tools (I'd say as early as mid 2000s or even before) have certainly rectified these early mistakes, but I guess fashion moved on by then.

They certainly are listening to their customers who prefer “open” in some contexts. So in some ways they’re better behaved. And most excitement and activity in server side ecosystems tends to be open source.

But in terms of economic might, ie. revenue and equity, open source has been a weapon wielded by the tycoons to add to their might.

Linux is successful but the dominant vendor is owned by IBM. Canonical some day may also get scooped up.

Intel is finally feeling the pressure of custom chips and portable languages (it’s market cap is down to $230b), but Microsoft is nearing 2 trillion in market cap, Apple is 2.3 trillion, and Google/Amazon aren’t far behind either.

The result is that we arguably have more open and higher quality infrastructure than ever before. But the ultimate tycoons remain the same - with Google + Amazon being the new entrants.

The web, not open source, was a potential escape, but after a brief window were seeing that fall back as the walked garden app world takes over.

I mentioned in my earlier comment a "hand-drawn diagram of the architecture" - it was in fact a picture of the exact layout of this database including all the pointer blocks etc between the classes, methods, versions, etc.

One project I did was to convert that file format & pointer model to support larger database sizes of 16GB (IIRC). Fun exploring and updating that code. For testing I built a massive fake DB with random classes, methods, etc. The crazy thing was when that fake repo zipped down to almost nothing because it had so much repetition in the names!

The interface you're seeing is still alive and well in most Smalltalk environments. If you're on Windows, try Dolphin Smalltalk, which is now available for free.

https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1266322655604588544?s=20

I interviewed Mike Milinkovich about the VAJ->Eclipse transition in 2013:

https://www.infoq.com/interviews/Milinkovich-past-present-fu...

I think 32MB would have been about what a typical desktop would have come with in 1997, so yeah, it was a hog. I remember my manager buying extra memory for us and having us install it ourselves because he didn't want to wait for IT.