Smalltalk is making a comeback - Gartner analyst

blogs.gartner.com

12 points·musiciangames··5 comments

I agree that OO is making a big comeback, especially with the explosive fervor behind these new web frameworks (Rails, Django, etc).

It seems to me that the biggest case for Smalltalk is that it was the foundation for Ruby, and Rails is definitely pushing Ruby into the top tier.

In other news, Alan Kay = badass. He came to my class and talked about how he was trying to use LISP to code TCP/IP in 80 lines.

How does Smalltalk bind to other languages such as C, in order to reuse code libraries? That's a pretty big question if it is to make a "comeback".

For instance, Objective-C adds quite a bit to C, and replaces C++ features, yet it can bind to either of those languages. And there's been work done to make the entire Python standard library usable in Ruby.

depends on the implementation. squeak makes using C routines and libraries easy. The older commercial smalltalk's all have simple ways of making system calls or writing primitives inline or as libraries.

Ruby does make adding C easy. Smalltalk is a little less friendly in this regards. But only a little and that is implementation specific.

It's happened a time or three that one of the uninitiated has gandered at my bookshelf during a dinner party and picked up "Inside Smalltalk" only to be sorely disappointed.

He never explains how it's making a comeback.

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