I saw Paul Fernhout mention this once on /. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1578224&cid=31429692
He linked to: http://fargoagile.com/joomla/content/view/15/26/ which references: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-December/112337.html which states: When I became V.P. of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk in 1996, Bill > Lyons (then CEO) told me the same story about Sun and VW. According > to Bill, at some point in the early '90's when Adele was still CEO, > Sun approached ParcPlace for a license to use VW (probably > ObjectWorks at the time) in some set top box project they were > working on. Sun wanted to use a commercially viable OO language with > a proven track record. At the time ParcPlace was licensing Smalltalk > for >$100 a copy. Given the volume that Sun was quoting, PP gave Sun > a firm quote on the order of $100/copy. Sun was willing to pay at > most $9-10/copy for the Smalltalk licenses. Sun was not willing to go > higher and PP was unwilling to go lower, so nothing ever happened and > Sun went its own way with its own internally developed language > (Oak...Java). The initial development of Oak might well have predated > the discussions between Sun and PP, but it was PP's unwillingness to > go lower on the price of Smalltalk that gave Oak its green light > within Sun (according to Bill anyway). Bill went on to lament that > had PP played its cards right, Smalltalk would have been the language > used by Sun and the language that would have ruled the Internet. > Obviously, you can take that with a grain of salt. I don't know if > Bill's story to me was true (he certainly seemed to think it was), > but it might be confirmable by Adele. If it is true, it is merely > another sad story of what might have been and how close Smalltalk > might have come to universal acceptance. > > -Eric Clayberg > > That being said, I have no idea why people think Smalltalk-80 would have been uniformly better than Java. I am not saying this to be negative. In my view, much of the biggest mistakes with Java were requiring insane legacy compatibility, and doing it in really bad ways. Swing should have never have been forced to reuse AWT, for example. And AWT should never have had a concrete component model, thus "forcing" Swing to inherit it (dropping the rabbit ears, because I see no good explanation for why it had to inherit AWT's component model via "implementation inheritance"). It's hard for me to even guage if the Swing developers were good programmers or not, given that ridiculously stupid constraint. It's not like Swing even supported phones, it was never in J2ME. The best I can conclude is that they were not domain experts, but who really was at the time? On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:14 PM, Steve Dekorte <st...@dekorte.com> wrote: > > I have to wonder how things might be different if someone had made a tiny, > free, scriptable Smalltalk for unix before Perl appeared... > > BTW, there were rumors that Sun considered using Smalltalk in browsers > instead of Java but the license fees from the vendors were too high. Anyone > know if that's true? > > On 2010-10-08 Fri, at 11:28 AM, John Zabroski wrote: > > Why are we stuck with such poor architecture? > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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