Everyone re-invents Smalltalk
Ted Neward points to an article he mostly disagrees with - but stumbles into yet another re-invention of something Smalltalk got to a long time ago:
Why do we distribute applications across multiple systems today? Is it because we like managing multiple systems? No! It's for scalability. We exploit the fact that tiers of a multi-tier app have different processing loads and scalability methods. Typically, we scale the web/app tier by throwing more servers at the farm while we scale the data tier with bigger servers. However, as Moore's law increases the performance of these machines, the need to scale becomes reduced, From my experience, many smaller apps could easily run a single machine today (esp. when you consider the increased efficiency of eliminating the network and process hops). Moore's law will continue increase the headroom these machines provide and expand the definition of "smaller apps". If you can run the app on a single hardware node, there'd be little reason not to run as much of it as you can inside the database, other than "we might want to scale this out someday".
I wonder if these guys have ever heard of Gemstone/S?
Comments
Untitled
[] April 15, 2004 8:44:26.677
They have and they don't care. When are you going to get that no one cares about Smalltalk and your whining about that every single thing ever done anywhere in tech land has been done by Smalltalk first (including brew coffee I guess) is sickening?
Re. Everyone re-invents Smalltalk
[Steve Wart] April 15, 2004 9:06:32.794
I personally find it heartening that so many anonymous whiners care enough about Smalltalk that not only do they read every word Jim has to write about the subject, they even go through the trouble of posting their creative and original thoughts on his blog.
No, just everything OO
[Isaac Gouy] April 15, 2004 10:27:56.344
"every single thing ever done anywhere in tech land has been done by Smalltalk first"
The Lisp and Fortran guys would beat us to a pulp if we ever dared claim such a thing. Instead we fondly imagine that Smalltalk did every OO thing first (and hope that the Simula folk don't notice.)
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[Hmmm...] April 15, 2004 12:24:56.778
If people didn't reinvent Smalltalk, it would be harder and harder for the latest crop of software engineers to win an all-macho intellectual competition. With software engineering / computer science as it stands today (no education leads to high salary if you can type fast enough), the bar will keep getting lower and lower. Of course this applies everywhere, not just our area of expertise.
Notes
[Patrick Logan] April 15, 2004 18:05:44.543
(1) If these folks are attempting to reinvent Smalltalk in Java and C#, they are doing a piss poor job of it. (2) Gemstone/S scales up the number of users *best* when everything runs on a *single* kick-ass machine. The shared page cache is the key. You put the less intensive processes on the distributed machines. (3) Still it does do distribution pretty damn seamlessly. (4) If only Gemstone did not kill the Federation system and the System Management Framework. Even better distribution.
Greenspun's 10th Law
[Gordon Weakliem] April 16, 2004 14:36:14.657
Sorry, Philip Greenspun already has prior art on this claim :-)