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What a well-written account of "how things are done".

> Time to drop a bit of a bombshell: the [Barbara] source code is in Barbara too, not on disk. Remain composed. It's kept in a special Barbara ring called sourcecode.

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This makes it feel like a gigantic Smalltalk instance.

Interestingly, after writing this (some years ago) I spoke to some of the original authors. They had never used Smalltalk. So I suppose they invented this stuff independently

Could be. I got the same vibes with Zope, which is Python and has an object database underneath it. At the time I had the impression the idea was popular in finance.

Zope was strongly influenced by Smalltalk

> The ZODB is an (almost) transparent python object persistence system, heavily influenced by Smalltalk.

https://zodb.org/en/latest/articles/ZODB-overview.html#compa...

I think Jim Fulton and other authors of Zope originally came from Smalltalk

I loved Zope (and ZODB). No matter what I said, I could never convince the higher-ups it was the way to go. In retrospect, they were probably right. But those technologies were magnificent.

Thanks to the Plone crowd, Zope now runs on Python 3 and still deserves some work. I’m not sure how to shoehorn Git-based workflows on top of it transparently, but I would still love to play with it.

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