[Help-smalltalk] Fwd: Are Objects really hard?

[Janko Mivšek]

-------- Prvotno sporočilo --------
Datum:  Sun, 12 Feb 2012 09:55:08 +0000
Od:     Bob Calco <address@hidden>


Hi everyone,


  On Feb 11, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:

  > Hi Stef,
  >
  > S, stephane ducasse piše:
  >
  >> Frankly I do not care about what other people are thinking.
  >> OOP is a success look at Java, C#.
  >>
  >> Now let us keep our energy to build better Smalltalks.

  > Well, after hard work it is good from time to time to make a
  > retrospection and let our thoughts to think broader, to look from
  > a distance to our work. To see the forest and not just trees.
  >
  > So such debate from time to time is certainly refreshing and needed,
  > specially if is started from a outsider's perspective.Every wise man
  > listen to the opinion of others. Well, of course wisely :)
  >
  > In this case I see wise thinking about weaknesses of OO, Smalltalk
  > and how to overcome it by better "best practices". For instance, the
  > newcommers are asking where to find a guidelines for modeling OO
  > models in pure OO way. In this guidelines we can emphasise above
  > mentioned best practices, then author's claim that  "no one really
  > understands to this day how to do them right" won't be valid
  > much anymore.
  >
  > Best regards
  > Janko

As a certified noob to Smalltalk hailing from the Ruby, Delphi, .NET and
Java worlds where RDBMs rule, I must say I'm amused how anyone can say
Smalltalk has *failed.*

I had a funny experience when doing mainly Rails development a couple
years ago. I had an interview at a PHP shop, where the main technical
guru there insisted that Ruby/Rails had "failed" and wanted me to tell
him why. I told him, actually, there were bugs in the early ActiveRecord
API that exposed Rails to scalability problems, not the framework or
design concept itself. I pointed out that if Rails failed, so did
Symfony, and Django, ASP.NET <http://ASP.NET> MVC, and countless other
copy-cat frameworks in other languages/platforms. If one measure of
failure is industry adoption, then there was no way Rails failed.

And where did MVC come from? Well, we know that answer. The whole
discussion is pointless. Engineers sometimes get the idea that because
they or a project they were on failed that happened to be using a
particular tool, the tool is a failure. At bottom, this guy was bitten
by Rails and so he had a kind of vendetta against it. As if PHP is the
way, the truth and the light. By the way they offered me a job anyway,
but I didn't take it. :)

Some tools make certain things harder or easier.  I find Smalltalk
liberating as it makes it easy to decompose hard domain problems sans
all the syntactic cruft of the so-called modern languages -- which,
funny enough, are constantly trying to find new and more complicated
ways to express what Smalltalk has always done simply: generic
collections, metadata, reflection, etc.

So, I'm going against the grain and getting into Smalltalk. I have been
a bit disappointed by the state of certain libraries and the relatively
small community, but I enjoy the language and feel more productive in
it, so...that's what matters to me.

- Bob


-- 
Janko Mivšek
Aida/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

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