2022 Medley Interlisp Annual Report
interlisp.org
interlisp.org
I have spent a few hours running this project on my Mac. Memories!
It still does for Java 2022 (and C# 11, or C++23)
- expensive commercial licenses over free Java/C/C++
- multiple vendors with incompatible versions
- closed nature and hard to integrate with existing tooling (editors, vcs, OS)
- poor story for Web, Java had applets and JS was native
- slower and memory hungry compared to C++
- lack of type safety compared to Java/C# or OcamlIBM's Developer portal from 1998 - 2002 shows quite well how much IBM was partnering with Sun spreading the Java gospel.
C# only came to be after Microsoft's misadventure, and OCaml never mattered that much in 2000.
- poor story for Web - slower and memory hungry - lack of type safety compared
And which of those supposed explanation would also suggest that JS should be unpopular
- slower and memory hungry - lack of type safety compared
Think again.
Python was free and open source, had one of the best interop with other tools and excellent open ecosystem. Python now have better type safety via mypy than Smalltalk ever had.
> And which of those supposed explanation would also suggest that JS should be unpopular
JS is destined to be popular, it has monopoly in browser. It is the only reason why it is popular.
> Think again.
I worked on Smalltalk project for a year and I know how limited and closed it is. Smalltalk had combination of all these factors that made people choose C/C++/C#/Java for performance, JS for browser, Perl/Python/PHP for scripting and Visual Basic for GUIs. There were hardly any places where Smalltalk was a better choice.
I worked on Smalltalk projects for a decade.
Free as-in-beer wins popularity contests.
This is probably the big reason - Smalltalk is its own OS and GUI, and didn't play well with others until relatively recently.
> poor story for Web, Java had applets and JS was native
This only became relevant after Smalltalk was already very niche.
> slower and memory hungry compared to C++
So was Java back then, and, thanks to free-as-in-beer and being easier to integrate into build tooling and the workflows developers were used to, it had a much bigger impact.
> lack of type safety compared to Java/C# or Ocaml
The way Smalltalk works, this is more a feature than a bug. It's a given it'll result in more runtime errors if types are abused, but that's also one of the reasons so much early progress on automated unit testing started there.