Dolphin is Over

I am of course very saddened by this news because Dolphin has been my favorite Smalltalk development environment. Is there an opportunity here for Cincom to buy up Dolphin, and to leverage Cincom's success and resources with Dolphin's extraordinary design?

I just came into the Smalltalk community last winter, and I'd heard of Dolphin and have learned about it bit by bit from others. It's interesting that Andy Bower says, "Both Blair and I dislike the Open Source movement intensely and we would rather see Dolphin gradually disappear into the sands of time than instantly lose all commercial value in one fell swoop." Could this just be sour grapes that OSS has already taken a significant part of the commercial value out of it? I mean, the OSS movement has its warts, but I don't think I'd ever say I "dislike it intensely", except to describe the attitude of many individuals in that community (excluding Squeak and Ruby) who are beligerant and not too welcoming.

Anyway, I wonder what's up with that. I mean Smalltalk started out as a system where all the source was available, except perhaps for the VM kernel. Xerox kept Smalltalk hush hush for a while, but the intent was there to make its internals fully available for people to modify. One of the things Alan Kay complained about for a long time was that Smalltalk had become a "holy standard" that nobody was supposed to change, once it got released into the wild.

Sadly the end of Dolphin could drive some people away from Smalltalk. I'd frequently hear from people in discussions on Squeak that they didn't like it. It was a little too clunky for them, and they didn't like the aesthetics. But they loved Dolphin.

Maybe Object Arts is vying for a buyer. Otherwise it seems counter-productive to me to just come out and say they're never going to open source it. As I understand it, Seaside just got ported to it recently. It could've had another life.

Dolphin was hands down the best Smalltalk development environment out there.    I doubt Squeak had any part in Dolphin's death though.  Squeak is a complete joke and will always remain a joke.  The real problem is that Smalltalk never evolved.  People should have been looking at Slate for inspiration on how to evolve Smalltalk.  

Cincom's Smalltalk product will eventually die too after all the legacy Smalltalk code has been converted to Java and .NET.  There's just nothing compelling about Smalltalk anymore.  You don't evolve you die.

Comment by James Robertson

Over here in the real world, Rick - our profits and revenues in the Cincom Smalltalk business are up.

James, you have a lot of trouble being objective about the real world.  Your comments about Microsoft show that.  Your weird ideas about RoR being good for Cincom and Smalltalk show that.  

Smalltalk is legacy, and Dolphin dying is just more evidence of it.

Methinks Rick might be trolling a bit. Has Netcraft confirmed this crippling bombshell that has hit the already beleagured Smalltalk community? Just because a language is historical doesn't mean it's dead. I think there are more than a few C projects floating around somewhere :-/

Plus many different software providers fail over the years. Dolphin was a good product and it's a shame it didn't capture a larger development audience. But that doesn't mean that the entire development language is sliding off the cliff.

That's about the level of discourse I'm seeing here, Rick.

Even if I cede your point that Smalltalk is legacy, which I don't, there's nothing hugely wrong with legacy. Does it get the job done?

And speaking of the real world and objectivity, just how many hours do you have working with Java, .NET, Dolphin, and VisualWorks? Which ones have you spent enough time with to have an informed opinion of?

In case anyone asks, I've got zero time in Dolphin, a few years of serious development with VisualWorks, a few years serious development with .NET, I've managed to find ways to build a couple of slightly bigger than trivial programs with Java, and more years than I like to admit with Pascal, C, and Assembly language. Oh, and a few years doing E&S with ObjectStudio. I've got enough experience with all of them to have a good idea where they suck and where they don't.

What's your flight log book look like, anyway?

Troy, your background includes a lot of experience actually working with these technologies.  Unfortunately, those in CA (Corporate America) who make the decisions on what languages will or will not be used in their respective organizations do not have your hands-on experience.  They generally did some development early in their careers, then got onto the "management track" and now make these decisions based on what they read in the trade press, or the lastest Gartner report.  None of which ever mentions Smalltalk.

I agree, Tom. I'm with Scott Adams--the Peter Principle is way too optimistic :) Then again, to advance at all a lot of people felt they had to jump on the management track. We live with the consequences of that, as you note.

My point to Rick is that I can't recall ever hearing his qualifications to judge Dolphin over VisualStudio, or either over .NET or Java. Maybe he's a Gartner follower, I just don't know, but after his assertion, I wanted some evidence of credibility.