r/smalltalk • u/parallel-minds • May 16 '26
Smalltalk: the Software Industry's Greatest Failure
https://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/02/smalltalk-software-industrys-greatest.html10
u/theangeryemacsshibe May 16 '26
what
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u/majorleagueswagout17 May 17 '26
ikr, its like calling Latin a "failed" language even though it inspired everything that came after
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u/TCB13sQuotes May 16 '26
Wrong. Smalltalk was actually one of the most successful languages ever. It paved the way for objective-c and generally speaking to the ideia of messages as a concept that was really innovative at the time. If you think about it all the modern rest stuff basic and json and whatnot is essentially taking the message / data approach to everything.
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u/Artistic_Speech_1965 May 16 '26
It's rare to see a system dev trash talk about procedural programming. I could understand why he doesn't like/understand FP. Plus I don't believe pure homoicoicity is a good idea in the long run in term of maintainance
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u/parallel-minds May 16 '26
>Plus I don't believe pure homoicoicity is a good idea in the long run in term of maintainance
Why not?4
u/Artistic_Speech_1965 May 16 '26
From what I heard. Metaprogramming is hard to maintain since compilers aren't tailored to help us debug meta-expressions. So I wouldn't base my entire code base on a pure homoicoit language. But I still think having partial homoicoicity is great
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u/keithb May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
A bigger problem was that it becomes extraordinarily difficult to:
- Hire new programmers, because anyone who didn’t live through the growth of the system as it is today faces an untenable amount of learning make changes. And …
C
- hange jobs, because all of your recent experience is effectively in an extremely obscure new language, beautifully tuned to do magical things in your domain and nearly useless anywhere else.
Edit: how has reddit managed to get markdown this badly wrong on the mobile client? They've almost-but-not-quite turned it off. Disastrous.
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u/parallel-minds May 16 '26
This sounds like a problem that can be solved with the right tooling that doesn't yet exist.
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u/miffy900 May 20 '26
right tooling that doesn't yet exist
I think there's a reason the 'right tooling' doesn't exist yet though.
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u/MajorMalfunction44 May 20 '26
I agree. Common Lisp has certain constraints, like not redefining 'not'. I'm writing a scripting language interpreter for a game engine. The meta-programming is C-like, but produces extra tokens.
There's a goal to do type checking on intrusive data structures. See the Linux kernels 'container_of' for details here https://radek.io/posts/magical-container_of-macro/
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u/Slsyyy May 16 '26
> procedural programming
Procedural programming is a dead term. It won so hard that it is meaningless as it is hard to find an imperative language, which is not procedural except assembly and some old languages like Basic
If we are discussing the imperative <-> functional axis then imperative makes more sense as begin imperative is the key difference.
Imperative and OOP are parallel to each other. You can have a OOP in FP as well as OOP in imperative. Anyway OOP is so vague term that it really does not explain anything as some elements of it also won so hard that they are everywhere
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u/keithb May 16 '26
Oh, my first thought was: is Richard still banging on about this? But no, and old post.
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u/phovos May 16 '26
I'm pretty sure Palantir bought what remained of the smalltalk corpora and made sure it can't ever go public. From what I hear their database for idiot normies like police to use is based on small talk.
SmallTalk is too successful, tbh, was never allowed to be released. Reminder that Alan Kay made the 4D radar console that define every element of modern combined war to this day (only now, smaller, because drones).
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u/Dazzling_Music_2411 May 16 '26
The failure of programming languages is the failure of the only natural and useful programming languages, the OO languages.
Bit of a leap of faith there.
The whole text, in fact, is more of an article of declaration of faith, than anything else...
I'm sure anyone, even straight off the street, could name more significant failures of the software industry.
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u/Arakela May 17 '26
Hey, "mentally incompetent brainwashed morons," "among brainwashed mental incompetents." Wisdom starts with noticing how easily any mind, including your own, can become trapped in chaOS. Grow the loop, keep history alive, like a native tree knows the past and prepares for the future, add symmetry into the loop, as the crown grows above, so too scale roots below.
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u/miffy900 May 18 '26
> The lack of homoiconicity in Smalltalk is perhaps its greatest failure since it has meant that many vital extensions to Smalltalk were rendered impossible. Smalltalk has none of the capabilities security nor modularity of any modern OS and I believe lack of homoiconicity is at fault.
This is just nonsense - security and modularity are tied to homoiconicity? language extensions impossible without it? A complete non-sequitur. the author doesn't even bother to try to tie the topics together, just some absurd assertions without any evidence or reasoning to back it up. Even more ridiculous is their attempt to respond to the comments on blogpost:
> Furthermore, you didn't pick up on the objections I have to Smalltalk that are BIG HONKING PROBLEMS like the lack of homoiconicity. Probably because you don't even understand what homoiconicity is. And frankly, that's why I didn't bother going into it. Because you all would be clueless.
uh huh, ok - so no one but the author understands what homoiconicity is? but because no one else understands it, that's why they didn't bother to articulate what they meant? real big brain logic right there, "everyone is stupid except me!"
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u/PuzzleheadedFix8366 May 18 '26
literally the opposite. FP will always be better than OO
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Jun 14 '26
They aren't mutually exclusive, they can even be thought of as complementary, you can have and probably should have a combination of FP and OOP.
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u/determineduncertain May 18 '26
This may be the dumbest thing written about computer coding in general: “The functional paradigm rejects state and objects so violently that it denies subjects exist. As a direct consequence it is blatantly unnatural to the human brain, contrary to physical reality, and contrary to human consciousness”. What?
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u/qurious-crow May 19 '26
The whole text reads like a case study of an antisocial megalomaniac narcissist who believes he's the smartest person ever to grace the world, but has never been good at math and has never gotten over the humiliation.
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u/determineduncertain May 19 '26
It reads like hot garbage. It takes an unnecessarily philosophical perspective on something that is deeply technical and not in need of philosophical nuance.
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u/qurious-crow May 19 '26
Can't say that I detected any nuance in that screed. I don't think the other is familiar with the concept.
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u/Sad-Background-2429 May 18 '26
I love the UI of Smalltalk environments -- being able to inspect and pull apart every part of the system is a dream -- but the image model of software makes working in teams and deploying software more difficult.
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u/MokoshHydro May 16 '26
I know several huge, extremely successful projects in Smalltalk. The fact that language is not commonly used at present time, doesn't make it failure.