5 posts tagged “ruby”
It’s too bad the Io language has an implicit non-overridable “asBoolean” method in the Object base class. That’s a mistake… the same one Ruby and Perl made. Only Smalltalk gets that right. it’d be ok if I could at least override “asBoolean” for my classes as far as ifTrue: and ifFalse: are concerned, but no. Io has its own idea, and that’s that. And I can’t even get it to throw a “must be boolean” error instead. Sigh. So close, and yet so far away.
The InfoQ website interviewed me recently about Smalltalk and Seaside and Squeak. It's a nice article with a lot of external references. Check it out!
From the blog of Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner group, we see:
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So Yeah.. I said it. Smalltalk is making a comeback.
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Bottom line:
1) If you have investments in Smalltalk consider the risk of the language to be lower over the next 3 years than the last 3 years. Smalltalk is cool again. Is it the start of a long term trend or a fad? Yet to been seen.
2) If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look. You might like what you see. Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles. You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside.
In the end we’ll see a up tick in Smalltalk momentum over the next few years. I’m not entirely sure it will be enough to change the long term trend of a declining developer base but I does my heart good to see a “members only” jacket come back into style nonetheless.
I just finished watching a well-produced video of James Foster presenting MagLev, Seaside, and GemStone at OTUG in Minneapolis. You should also look at what James says about the video on his blog as well.
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The simple truth is that for web applications dynamic approaches are massively more productive. Take a look at Seaside (Smalltalk), Grails (groovy) or Rails (Ruby) and its clear that Java has nothing to compare. The DSLs provided by these languages make web development a cinch. Productivity improvements of 2-3 times is not uncommon. This translates to a reduced time to market, and better responsiveness to business needs.
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The domains where Java makes sense are shrinking. Given the performance of dynamic languages nowadays and the ability to inter-operate with high performance system languages like C++, I see Java and C# being squeezed.
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