Re:Alan Kay and OO Programming
by pjc50 on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @12:01PM
(#19971429)
Indeed. Berating people is the worst form of advocacy.
Advocates of LISP and Smalltalk need to come up with reasons why their languages have not won the adoption wars that aren't "everyone else is an idiot" or "if only we told them the gospel they would convert".
(In fact, in some ways they've almost overwhelmingly won, it's just that those two particular languages didn't. The bulk of code today is written in the late-binding language Javascript, with its novel prototypical inheritance that enables run time patching. Lots of data is stored in JSON, which is a marginal improvement over S-expressions. Apple have people undramatically writing Objective-C, the Smalltalk inheritor. Perhaps the problem is not that they didn't win but that they aren't being hailed as heroes?)
Advocates of LISP and Smalltalk need to come up with reasons why their languages have not won the adoption wars that aren't "everyone else is an idiot" or "if only we told them the gospel they would convert".
(In fact, in some ways they've almost overwhelmingly won, it's just that those two particular languages didn't. The bulk of code today is written in the late-binding language Javascript, with its novel prototypical inheritance that enables run time patching. Lots of data is stored in JSON, which is a marginal improvement over S-expressions. Apple have people undramatically writing Objective-C, the Smalltalk inheritor. Perhaps the problem is not that they didn't win but that they aren't being hailed as heroes?)