Before you can have Smalltalk, you must first defeat capitalism? | Hacker News Reader

Before you can have Smalltalk, you must first defeat capitalism?

mgaudet.ca

14 pointsska8011 comments

> Some people, unbound from the strictures of having to work themselves to the bone to eat, will produce plays, will produce symphonies.

I don‘t get the point to link will produce symphonies to the wikipedia page of Philip Glass. It is well known that he had to work as a plumber for decades.

Once Smalltalk was released into the wild by Xerox PARC, several companies tried to commercialize it, including IBM. The problem was that developers needed expensive workstations to develop and deployment required pricey run-time-environments and yet, the source code was difficult to hide from the users.

Then the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh were released. Both were cheaper than the workstations and the Mac even had the cool look of the Smalltalk desktop. For non-purists the new options were far more appealing even if they fell way short of the Smalltalk-80 environment's benefits.

March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=...

https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/extended-memory

The proletariat can rock that soviet tech, making some lips/forth/prolog insanity. Once they're done, I'll simulate it at 10,000 times native speed on one core of my Apple iThing.

unless you own land and manage not to sell it to buy food, you should not assume that you will still have your current lifestyle in ten years. even if you are of the rentier class, you should not assume that there will be enough people who can afford your prices in ten years.

The US population has gone from 150 million in 1950 to over 350 million. This has been accompanied by a huge migration from rural areas to the city. There is no way house prices could not go up but there is always going to be a limit on how much things increase by before they stop selling because the buyers vanish.

The more interesting question for me is once the baby boomers start dying off and population growth becomes a big fat negative is what will happen to property prices.

your population won't shrink, you'll import the third world first.

Ironic, given that capitalism drove the creation of Smalltalk, and the boomer generation ruined college for those who came after

As one of the boomer generation, I would be fascinated to hear how we ruined college.

I don't think we can blame only one generation for this:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student...

Went to college on the cheap (you could probably earn enough to pay tuition from a summer job) and then pull the tax subsidy out once you became middle-aged.

The student loan money spigot also hurt (supported by boomer elected officials), as did the rise of the administration (managed by boomers).

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