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Comment by b00ty4breakfast | Hacker News Reader

the whole Smalltalk saga is a bit of a tragedy looking back (EDIT: as someone who didn't live through that era) through the context of the current state of consumer computing being so "non-convivial", if I can borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich. Empowering users by allowing them to conform the tools to their own usecase often feels like the exact opposite paradigm of the modern milieu.

Or maybe I'm just entering my "old man yells at cloud" phase of life haha

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Saga: https://web.archive.org/web/20130612055149/http://www.mojowi...

Well, I DID live through that era and I AM the 'old-man-yelling-at-clouds' ;-) and the main issue was that getting Smalltalk developers was a HUGE headache. I worked for a Telecom company (Canada's largest, rhymes with 'Ortel') and we needed to develop our own courses - yours truly developed and delivered dozens of hours of training.

This lead to some extraordinary per-diem charges that I knew some folks enjoyed for a while, mostly paid for by the Financial industry. Eventually those on the paying side looked for cheaper alternatives .. and yes, the new-kid-on-the-block Java played a big role, but so did Visual Basic!

'We read and heard many stories about confident and experienced programmers plunging into self-study tutorials, only to give up in frustration after several hours, still wondering, "Where is the application code?" The object paradigm, in which program control is distributed across a set of tightly encapsulated and high-function software objects, was alien to experts in procedural design.

… to use Smalltalk fluently, a programmer must become familiar with a huge class hierarchy and with the tools of a sophisticated interactive programming environment. New programmers often became lost in the hierarchy or spent considerable time in unfocused exploration of the interactive tools.'

"Making Use: scenario-based design of human-computer interactions", 2000, page 103

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Making_Use/s-0ZuadhBBAC...

doesn't sound much different than studying the class library of any other language.

The past is a foreign country …

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