In his RailsConf keynote Bob Martin channeled Ward Cunningham to say that Smalltalk died because “It was too easy to make a mess”.
Whether Smalltalk is dead is the subject of much debate. Technically it’s not. There is ongoing development on the language and tools (notable by Cincom). But for all intents and purposes, it is no longer a commercially viable language. That said, it’s cool, and was a great context in which to learn OO. For that I am forever grateful to it.
I, personally, don’t think that “being easy to make a mess” was the cause of Smalltalk’s downfall. Sure, it was easy… but it’s easy to make a mess in any language. I have to agree with James Robertson that Smalltalk makes it easier to clean up your messes.
I was a serious Smalltalk user ‘back in the day’.. in the late 80s & early 90s: ObjectWorks, VisualWorks, Digitalk. I used it both in industry (some early CDROM shrinkwrapped products as well as client server) and academically (for my MSc thesis work). It was a wonderful language and environment. I saw firsthand, a few things that I believe lead to it’s demise:
- The unfamiliarity of the language and environment,
- The incompetence of the company tasked with commercializing it (ParcPlace), with their ridiculous licensing/royalty demands, and
- Arrogance, but not so much of the community, but of the environments themselves. It was beautifully cross platform, but at the expense of a truly native environment. In fact it was quite late into the game that you had windows out on your desktop instead of in it’s own self-contained world or even with simulated platform look & feel. As I said, that changed, but I believe it was too little, too late. There were some native implementations that were reasonably good.. but none approached the power of those descending directly from the PARC codebase. And Squeak, the shiny new smalltalk, goes back to that we-are-the-world arrogance.
So.. no… I don’t think what “killed” Smalltalk will kill Ruby. We’ve learned a lot since the 80s… a lot about how to keep a system healthy. The TATFT attitude is part of it. Notice I said attitude, and not practice.
We still can learn a lot from Smalltalk, specifically from it’s toolset. When we finally have good, useful Ruby IDEs they won’t look like Java IDEs. They’ll look like Smalltalk IDEs.
So… Smalltalk dead? Yes, no, does it matter? Smalltalk lives on in Ruby.