>Sigh. Nothing killed Smalltalk. It's not dead. Neither is Scheme. Yeah, both of those languages have pretty small communities
That's how we define "dead" for languages: "pretty small communities".
>but that's viable in the Internet Age.
Viable to exist and continue having small communities. But not viable for what matters to lots of people, mainly being able to use them for their company/projects with great support from various sources, documentation, books, new releases and bug fixes commining round the clock, and answers for their questions on Stack Overflow.
Oh stop picking his reply apart when you exactly what his point is: if you consider smalltalk "dead", and you are "going to invent a cool new language" then you can probably get into the BACK of the popularity line, after REBOL or whatever, as basically you aren't worthy... not even close to worthy...
in a nutshell, a still-revered, still-used (niche public) language built by people with an actual high-level concept (TDD) from the academic world with the support of much of industry at the time, said language probably can safely stay on it's pedestal despite such a fluff-brained "analysis" as linked article purports to provide...
i mean the central point of this article is: "I'm going to make a language that will be big and smalltalk is a convenient hoity toity strawman for me to knockdown"
>then you can probably get into the BACK of the popularity line, after REBOL or whatever
I don't know. Golang, Rust, Clojure and Scala seem to do quite well for themselves, quite better than Smalltalk.
I don't have exact numbers of course, but considering job postings, use by high profile companies, books coming out, conferences, tooling created, blog posts and HN articles, they are way ahead of Smalltalk today.
Besides this:
>as basically you aren't worthy... not even close to worthy...
Sounds fishy to me. Even if you're not worthy there's no reason not to try if one wants to. And that's how we do get the 1 in 10.000 languages that ARE worthy anyway.
I don't know, I think I just disagree with his points (and agree more with the article).
He says: " a still-revered, still-used (niche public) language built by people with an actual high-level concept (TDD) from the academic world with the support of much of industry at the time, said language probably can safely stay on it's pedestal despite such a fluff-brained "analysis" as linked article purports to provide..."
To which I disagree. What do you think I didn't get?
That's how we define "dead" for languages: "pretty small communities".
>but that's viable in the Internet Age.
Viable to exist and continue having small communities. But not viable for what matters to lots of people, mainly being able to use them for their company/projects with great support from various sources, documentation, books, new releases and bug fixes commining round the clock, and answers for their questions on Stack Overflow.