Noticing Croquet
Ted Leung spots the Croquet talk from last year, and has a few thoughts on it. It's worth reading the whole thing - he mentions a number of good kay comments. I found this comment at the end of Ted's post interesting:
Much as I love Lisp, it seems to me that the Smalltalk community, led by folks like Kay, are continuing to demonstrate a convincing agenda for forward progress, while the Lisp community is perennially struggling with basic infrastructure issues like which dialect of Lisp/Scheme, which windowing environment, etc. Perhaps this is due to the conception of Smalltalk as a system, in addition to a language.
Comments
It depends on dialect/flavour
[Sanjay Pande] July 11, 2004 13:17:19.537
While I believe Smalltalk is ahead of Lisp is basic design because of a tight integration of the environment with the VM with the language. The statement is only true for open source implementations of Common Lisp which have some problems or a shortage of libraries. As far as dialect I would pick Common Lisp over Scheme anyday. Most commercial Lisp implementations are relatively high quality and packed with libraries. One thing that is cool about Smalltalk is that the GUI is a part of the running image. I believe PLT-Scheme offers that capability (inspired from Lisp Machines IMHO).
If I was evaluating a commercial Smalltalk and a commercial Common Lisp implementation, I am pretty sure I could weight pros and cons either way and the decision would not be an easy one. In the open source space, I think something like Squeak is hard to beat from an environment perspective. Open source CL + Emacs + Ilisp/Slime gives one a fairly decent development environment but you miss the GUI libs which never really got standardized except for CLIM which I believe is licensed.
[Vincent Foley] July 11, 2004 13:47:28.402
I agree that more work gets done in Smalltalk because people don't argue about which dialect (maybe which implementation, but that usually is chosen in 15 minutes) and the environment totally beats Emacs + SLIME. Having buttons such as Senders and Implementors, having ways to search the entire system is extremely useful and can help producitivity tremendously.
The only times I would hesitate to use Smalltalk would be if the program I have to write is actually just a big script, so I would go with the language with the best library (usually in my case, this turns out to be Python), if there's some incentive to use a certain language (for example, they have a Delphi library and they want to use that). Another reason I wouldn't use Smalltalk is that sometimes, a command-line interface is more productive for users (as mentionned in a previous blog entry by James), and as far as I know, no Smalltalk has a ncurses binding or anything like this.