Hacker News Reader

I get the relational bit. But can you expand on the Smalltalk one?

Smalltalk got a lot right very early on that got adopted in bits by everyone eventually. The idea of a fully interactive IDE, designing systems as distributed objects that exchange messages, and so on.

Unfortunately parceling it out and fudging it killed a great concept and we got stuck with corporate driven "OOP" that lives on in Java, Kubernetes, etc.

It's a wonder the people at PARC divined so much of great conceptual designs and other companies got to profit from bungled versions thereof.

There were several great ideas at parc, indeed. I think the most powerful one goes unnoticed by most, which is how it was managed by Bob Taylor.

Smalltalk is not perfect, it had some good ideas, but also some bad ones (in the sense of not being practical in most contexts) like the "image" mixing of code and data.

Far from perfect indeed. Yet it encapsulated so much of software architecture that is still relied upon and hasn't been advanced significantly since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com