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What is the current state of Perl 6, is it production-ready?
Where do we stand right now?
There are many programmers curious about the current progress of Perl 6.
There are also two other topics open on on reddit and http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=835419 about this.
Firstly, and most importantly, follow the Planet Six news aggregator. Perl 6 weekly meetings and blogs from the lead developers and many members of the community are included, and it's a great way to keep up on the progress of Perl 6.
To get an idea of how Rakudo Perl, the leading Perl 6 implementation is doing, check out the Perl 6 Advent Calendar. Every day shows a different facet of Perl 6, and the extent to which it has been implemented right now by Rakudo.
Update (Mar 2012): perl6.org's feature comparison shows the implementation progress of both Rakudo and Niecza (a CLR-targeting compiler, e.g. .NET, Mono).
Perl 6, as a specification, is still undergoing constant refinement and refactoring. Some examples of where the spec is unclear: the object hierarchy, what should and should not be part of the core library, date handling, laziness, 'auto-threading' of junctions. But the bulk of the language has been finalised. The spec is very ambitious, and IMHO is one of the major reasons why Perl 6 has taken so long to get going.
In terms of implementation, the leading project is Rakudo Perl 6, built on top of the Parrot VM. There are perhaps a dozen dedicated developers and many more who are helping test, write libraries, code and documentation. Most development work is funded by grants from the Perl Foundation and community, so there is no reason to expect it to peter out.
Rakudo has plenty of bugs and plenty of missing functionality. It has only recently undergone a huge refactoring - the 'ng' branch. Browse any existing Perl 6 source and you'll find plenty of comments saying "Rakudobug" or "Rakudo doesn't yet implement this..."
Even so, this paints an unfair picture of Rakudo. The Perl 6 specification is ambitious to say the least. The language has such an insane number of features that it has taken implementations years of development to get to the level they are at today. Rakudo is certainly complete enough for people to have written text-based games, wikis and other web applications in, and it's getting better every day. Developers have written around 40,000 unit tests for Perl 6 so far, so it's easy to see improvements in the implementation (Rakudo currently passes ~30k tests, or 79% of the test-suite)
The first "usable" (stable) release of Rakudo is known as 'Rakudo Star'. It is currently planned for Q2 2010 (April-June). The general idea was to implement a large portion of Perl 6 - not the whole language, but a useful subset of it - and minimise bugs. As for production ready, Perl 6 has always had a release date of "Christmas". Perhaps this Christmas, more likely something else. It's going to be a long time before you can use the whole of Perl 6, bug-free, but we're at least going to see a stable release very soon, and hopefully the hype for Perl 6 will snowball from there once people discover that it's real.
If you are interested in Perl 6, you might consider getting involved in the community. From my experience it's a very friendly community (it almost creeps me out how nice everyone is, even on IRC). Install Rakudo, try to break it, file bugs. Write testcases. Write implementations for core functions, write modules. There's plenty to do!
Note: Please check the date of the original answer. As of April 2020, this is no longer the case.
Perl 6 is not production ready using most common definitions of "producion ready" as per SO's own thread - the implementations are not stable and possibly lack full features of the specification.
Please see this SO answer for details on the status as of 2008. The language specification seems stable (at least as per brian d foy in the linked post) but the implementation is not there yet.
As for specific dates, as per this post on 04/08/2010, the first major release of the most far-ahead Perl 6 implementation - Rakudo (on Parrot VM) - named "Rakudo Star 1.0" is tentatively aimed at Q2 2010 (original plan was around April 2010 but was shifted due to personal circumstances involving lead developer).
Of course, YMMV - I have seen people use a LOT less stable code/projects in production (including what they themselves wrote) than Perl 6's current state. But I personally wouldn't even begin to dream about deploying Perl 6 until it's been widely released for a while.
However, please note a very important point: the above does not mean that Perl 6 is vaporware or that it should not be learned - it does sound like it's progressing well and therefore I personally intend to start digging into it (well, already have thanks to SO) ahead of time so I'm ready to use it when it's stabilized a bit.
In addition, I'd like to add that a large chunk of great Perl 6 functionality was back-ported to Perl 5 (in 5.10-5-12, and see Perl6:: modules), so the above point about learning Perl6 is extremely relevant even if you don't have immediate plans to deploy Perl 6 itself.
Perl 6 was just officially released a few days ago, this Christmas 2015. Two very important things were released actually.
First and most importantly the official and now stable language specification, Perl 6.c (c for Christmas), was released. The specification is a suite of over 120,000 tests known as the Perl 6 Roast (Repository of All Spec Tests) which can be found on Github under perl6/roast.
Second, a new version of an implementation of Perl 6, known as Rakudo, was released. Rakudo is a Perl 6 compiler running on the MoarVM and JVM virtual machines. This new version of Rakudo targets the 6.c language specification and passes all tests on several major architectures. More information about the release can be found at on Github at rakudo/rakudo and in particular in the 2015.12 announcement under rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.12.md.
Rakudo is fairly straightforward to install, I personally recommend using rakudobrew which is a Rakudo installation manager. Follow the instructions here https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew. In addition to installing Rakudo and MoarVM it can also install Panda which is a Perl 6 module installer.
As a long-time Perl 5 and Python software developer I have to say Perl 6 looks to be an extremely powerful and deep language that solves many of the problems I find with existing dynamic languages. To take directly from the Rakudo announcement:
Retains the core values of Perl: expressiveness, getting the job done, taking influences from natural language, and pushing the boundaries of language design.
Has clean, modern syntax, rooted in familiar constructs but revisiting and revising the things that needed it.
Is truly multi-paradigm, enabling elegant object-oriented, functional, procedural, and concurrent programming
Serves as a great glue language, allowing for easy calling of C/C++ (using NativeCall) and staying compatible with Perl 5 (via Inline::Perl5).
Provides composable constructs for working with asynchronous data and parallel computations
Dramatically reforms and sets a new standard in regex syntax, which scales up to full grammars, powerful enough to parse Perl 6 itself
Has outstanding Unicode support, with strings working at grapheme level
Values lexical scoping and encapsulation, enabling easy refactoring
Is extensible through meta-object programming, user-defined operators, and traits
All the information you want to know about Perl 6 can be found here http://perl6.org/.
Interesting blog posted today by Leon Timmermans about some of the differences coming out in Perl 6.
Why Perl 6 Is Different Not much talk about when those differences will come out.
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Is it possible/feasible to use ObjC (not necessary the Apple flavor) to develop server-side web applications? Is GNU ObjC toolchain at all usable? Please share your thoughts and experiences.
Upd. I'd like to hear more answers with concrete practical experience, like "i tried/use .... and it is great/sucks, because...". 300 bounty!
Upd2. The rationale behind my question is that I'm about to develop an iOS app with a large web-based backend and thought it would be nice to use the same toolchain/IDE for both parts. But, alas, the answers so far show that this is not going to be feasible. Thanks everybody for taking time.
The answer that the market has pretty definitely settled on is that yes, it's possible, and no, it's not feasible to try to push such a thing on the market. Apple's WebObjects (what the Apple Online Store uses) used to be Objective-C and even they moved it to Java.
As for the GNU Objective-C toolchain, I wouldn't be hugely optimistic about its future, either. Since they moved to GPLv3, Apple has dumped them and built their own Objective-C compilers around LLVM, so those code paths are probably getting a little rusty on the GNU side. GNU "supports" everything under the sun, but the more something gets used the more its implementation gets vetted.
As for the "I've used" bit, yes, I used the Objective-C variant of WebObjects back in the day. It was pretty good for its time, but Objective-C's relatively low-level memory allocation needs and its non-C syntax made it a little awkward. And its strong typing was great for core development but burdensome for the "scripting" aspects of web development.
In the end if a language is Turing-complete you could theoretically do anything in one language you could do in another, but the lack of an ecosystem of libraries for parsers, scripting, database interactions, indexing, etc., means you'll be starting from a pretty deep valley compared to Java or a JVM-compatible language.
There is a javascript framework called Cappuccino that uses syntax very similar to Objective-C they call Objective-J. But as a long-time Cocoa developer, I prefer Sproutcore which doesn't copy Objective-C syntax, but it does borrow some ideas from Cocoa as it was created by former Apple engineers.
If you were thinking server-side development, I guess you could do it but it would probably take less effort to learn some popular server-side language than to get it all up and running with Objective-C
There is Frothkit. However, it hasn't been updated since 2010, primarily because of mature frameworks for other languages like Rails and Django.
Apple's WebObjects was originally an Objective-C platform before it was ported to Java. A sub-project of GNUStep, called GNUStepWeb, aims to be compatible with WebObjects 4.5---the last version to support Objective-C (released in 2000). I'm not sure how complete the implementation is, but there hasn't been much development in over a year.
Apple used to (and still partly does) build their web stuff using WebObjects, which ports the MVC structure and many design patterns of Cocoa apps to a Java-based web-server framework. I recently saw that someone is trying to create a server-side framework with Obj-J called Womble. Looks quite raw still, though. Either way, I'm not aware of a pure Obj-C web-framework implementation...
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I have recently heard about Magic programming language from several sources and didn't recall ever hearing about it before. It was mentioned that it is a programming language from Israel.
I did some googling and couldn't find much information about it. I couldn't find any code examples, and wikipedia didn't have any information on it either.
I think this is the site for it http://www.magicsoftware.com/en/products/?catID=70 though I am not sure, as it mentions uniPaaS instead of magic. However other material on the site indicates that this is the new name for it.
I was interested in learning more about it from it's practitioners, rather than the company. I saw several claims on the internet that it provided really fast application development, similar to claims made by RoR proponents when it came out.
How does it compare to VB?
Is it still a better RAD tool than current .net or mvc frameworks like django, ror ...etc?
How hard is it to learn?
If you can post some sample code it would be most helpful as well.
Could this site be it? Though it links back to the page above.
You're right my friend, Magic is the original name of the "programming language", nowadays is called UniPaaS (Uni Platform as a Service), I use it to develop some business application. Maybe is the fastest way to create an applications(data manipulation), you can create apps in just a few days, but like everything in life has its own drawbacks:
it's very weird so that makes it
difficult to learn.
you do not have all the control of what's happening in the background
and you have to pay a lot for licensing (servers,clients, etc)
If you are interested in learning this, you can download a "free" version of the software that only works with sqlite databases called UniPaaS Jet.
Magic Language is as it’s called today uniPaaS, it used to be Magic than eDeveloper and now uniPaaS as PachinSV menchend before.
uniPaaS is an application platform enabling enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) to more successfully build and deploy business applications.
You can download the free version of uniPaaS Jet here: http://web.magicsoftware.com/unipaas-jet-download,
try it yourself and see how easy it is to use.
Magic technology as you descried is a Magic Software Enterprises tool (uniPaaS), you can find more information on:
official website: www.magicsoftware.com/en/products/?catID=70&pageID=55
uniPaaS Jet developer group on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/unipaasJet/
Magic developer zone: devnet.magicsoftware.com/en/unipaas
Let me know if you find the information helpful
Bob
As PachinSV explained, there is a RAD once called Magic, then eDeveloper, now UniPaaS. This RAD is dedicated for database applications. Programming in this RAD does not look like anything else I know, you mostly don't write code as with usual languages, but it is nearly impossible to explain just with words. The applications are interpreted, not compiled.
As PachinSV said, when developing, you must follow UniPaaS' way of doing things. This is probably why so many people never manage to use Magic properly: if you thought like Magic before learning about it, then you will adapt to it easily; but if you have a long and successful experience using other database development tools, then often the Magic paradigm will never become natural to you. The learning curve is quite steep, you must learn a lot of things before being able to write a little application.
Previous versions stored the "code" inside a database table. The last version, UniPaas stores the code in xml files. I could send you an example, if PachinSV does not answer you before. But the files are pretty big: the smallest xml file I have in a test app is 4000 bytes, and any application is made of at least 11 files, an empty application is 7600 bytes. You must also understand that developers never use those files (they are undocumented AFAIK), they are only the storage format used internally by UniPaaS. The only way to use them is to set them up as a UniPaaS application.
I'm still an active MAGIC Developer... This is the old name used and its a completely different paradigm like some of you mentioned. I've been developing it from Magic version 8.x to eDeveloper 9.x to 10.x then renamed to UniPAAS.
The newer version is much easier to use and it is still very RAD in the sense that there is little or no code you write... a lot of the common programming tasks like IO, SQL command...etc is handled by the tool and is transparent ( so even less code to write since we use it in almost all types of applications)... Its mostly an Enterprise tool... you wouldnt use it for small application...
You can download the free version to learn the paradigm... but the enterprise licenses are expensive.. you need both the development tool and the runtime license if you want to deploy... so it can be costly for small scale projects...
I enjoy it personally, especially when you have to do quick proof of concepts or a quick data migration or porting onto any db platform and bridging any existing system through a wide range of gateways they provide with the licensed version.. It is up to date with the commonly used web technology out there...like SOAP, RIA ...
It's more popular in Europe... The HQ in the States is in Irvine... we used to have 2 branches in Canada but it closed down in 2001 .... Visit the Magic User Group on Yahoo... Its a very active forum with lots of cool people who will help you out in your quest...
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/magicu-l/
I Programmed with Magic for 6 years and found it to be a amazingly fast tool, easy to understand if you are a competent database programmmer because all operations are really about data manipulation. It is certainly a niche area develop in and because of this jobs are few and far between. As it is interpreted there are really no bugs to make. It will work with many databases/connections simultaneously but there is a big memory and processing hit.
Drawbacks :
Little control over communications between machines and devices
No mobile API as yet
Niche area so few skilled practitioners or companies willing to invest.
Good Points :
You can say you are a Magician; you can impress people with uber fast apps development (really)
It is easy to understand if you don't have a PHD in Maths
zero programming "bugs" can creep in. What you do is what you get.
Developed in The original Magic PC referred to by several of the above folks.
It is exactly this: FAST, FAST, but expensive and rigid in what it will allow you to do. It works on a tick tack toe like matrix. Dropping in commands into the various sections determines when they are run. The middle column is run indefinitely until you break the cycle. It is like a do Until loop. If you have to do an item once you put it into this infinite loop and end it after one cycle.
The first column procedures are run first, ONCE, before the infinite middle column is run. The 3rd column of commands is run after the infinite cycle, once. It is very efficient and logical once you get over the idea of an infinite loop.
Types can be specified and an associated program to present the type. Then everywhere the type is used all the settings automatically kick in. I like especially that one can write the program and 5 months later change the name of a variable and it is carried throughout the program. In fact the program does not use your name for anything. The internal name of any and all variables is hidden to the end user, so of course it is not a problem to change a name. It takes a minute to write an input program for any table. It takes a minute to write an export/import program for all the data files in the database.
Attaching to a type of database like Btrieve or SQL independent of the program itself.
I stopped using the language because they demand more for the runtime engine than I could charge for the programs I wished to run with it. Bill Gates went the opposite direction. VB is superior in control and being able to drop `10 datagridviews onto the same screen, but development is 10 times slower.
It's niche then is PROOF of concept for a program in a big company or conversion, importing, exporting for a development company. It is good for $25k programs that are database heavy and not going mobile.
uniPaaS, Magic PC
I did some Magic work around 1993. It was a DOS based 4GL that came from Israel. Haven't seen it since.
How does it compare to VB?
It doesn't.
Is it still a better RAD tool than current .net or mvc frameworks like django, ror ...etc?
If you mean "is it more Rapid", then yes, otherwise no.
How hard is it to learn?
About as hard as learning MS Access.
Coincidentally, if you want to get an idea of what it is and how it works, I've found that comparing it to MS Access is handy. It works in much the same way from a user's or developer's perspective. Obviously what happens in the background is vastly different, but if you've ever developed a form in design view in Access, Magic will seem very familiar.
Google tells me there's also MAGIC/L. All I could find about it was this blurb:
A procedural language written in
Forth. Originally ran on Z80's under
CP/M and later available for IBM-PCs
and Sun 3s.
The only Magic programming language that I know about is one used by a company called Meditech. It's a proprietary language derived from MUMPS.
The language is truly miserable - here's a sample.
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I'm at a stage where I am forced to learn Lua, so do you have any suggestions on how I do this? I don't have a lot of experience with any other scripting languages than PHP.
So, some suggestions on "head start Lua"-pages?
EDIT
As an addition to the wonderful tutorial pages, could you please suggest any "programs" I could make that will help me learn Lua? Imagine I would want to learn Pointers in C++, I'd make a Linked List. I want to touch the basics in Lua but meanwhile be open to pretty advanced stuff.
First of all work your way through the Programming in Lua, it should take you a day or two to get the gist of Lua.
However I can tell you right away on your first time through ignore coroutines and metatables, they are very powerful, but take a while to grasp. First learn the syntax, scoping (same as PHP luckily for you) and the standard libraries.
After that go back to coroutines and metatables, read them try them and by the third time through you might get it. Unless you have a very good CS background these are complex topics
Edit: The book is free online == website. Besides it is the best tutorial out there on Lua, everyone learns Lua with it.
Also: If you're purpose is Lua for World of Warcraft (probably not but just in case) you can check out this tutorial
And: Here is a tips and tricks thread on StackOverflow, might help give you some ideas of what to expect from Lua
Suggested Programs/Exercises:
Since you're initially looking at Lua for web development try to understand and improve the Data Description example in PIL. It'll give you a few good ideas and a nice feel for the power or Lua.
Then you might want to try out playing with the Data Structures chapter, although Lua has a single complex data-type, the Table, that chapter will show you Lua-like ways to make a table do anything you need.
Finally once you begin to grok metatables you should design a class system (yes with Lua you decide how your class system works). I'm sure everyone that knows Lua has made a dozen class systems, a good chapter to get you started on a class system is Object-Oriented Programming
And if you got time and know C or something like that (C# and Java included) try extending an application with Lua, but that'll take a week or two to do
Funny to see all these elaborate lists (though they are certainly correct). Back in 2002, I read about the first 20+ pages of the Lua reference manual, and started using it. It really is that simple. Lua (and ANSI C) are of the few languages that really fit in one's mind all at once - and stay there. For the others, at least I need to constantly do some relearning.
Be aware that getting to think in Lua will take time. I think mine was 6 months or so. When coming from C/C++, we tend to solve problems in certain ways. Lua might offer better means (i.e. via use of tables) but it takes a while to start seeing those. This transition to a higher abstraction level is similar to the Assembler->C shift in the 1980's. Many people still coded a while in C as if it only were a portable assembler.
There is also a large body of projects related to Lua at LuaForge.
If you happen to use Windows as your day-to-day platform, then I would recommend getting the Lua for Windows package as a nice starting point. It includes a wide array of useful modules all prebuilt and installed together with the Lua interpreter.
After your first pass through PiL and the reference manual, you will want to read Lua Programming Gems which is currently only available in a paper edition.
<plug> Do consider buying the books through the associate links at Lua's books page or LuaForge to support the projects. </plug>
Edit: As for ideas for programming projects where Lua is suited, look for problems where the table provides leverage. Tables are central to Lua, since even the global variables are just fields in a table. Tables can be indexed by values of any data type except nil, but have an especially efficient implementation if used as arrays.
One quirk that trips up people coming from a C-like background is that all things in Lua are naturally indexed starting from 1. Strings are indexed from 1, arrays start at 1, etc. Don't worry about it too much, there is nothing wrong with using a[0], but the length of the array given by #a is defined assuming that the array began with a[1].
Another quirk is that functions don't really have names. They are first class values that are usually stored in some variable that has a name. Syntax sugar makes it look like they have names, but that is just a convenience.
Metatables are a particularly Lua-ish feature of tables (and other types, but that is a really advanced topic) that are the basis for most of the schemes for doing object-oriented things in Lua.
Closures and true tail calls are other features of Lua that aren't often found in small scripting languages that can really make some idioms easy to implement.
In addition to the suggestions above, there's also the Lua wiki which is well worth a browse. There are a tremendous number of code snippets and small recipes there which can be useful.
I wrote a short quick-start guide to Lua for people using it on a project I was working on.
If you are familiar with other scripting languages it may get you up and running quickly.
The docs on Lua.org are very good and should cover most everything else you need. Lua is a pretty small language and can be learned fairly quickly.
This is a pretty general recommendation, but if you want to get started in a new programming language as a software engineer, it's fun to start doing the problems found at Project Euler in your new programming language. I've been doing this with Python recently and found it to be inspiring and bring a lot of enthusiasm to the coding.
You could install World of Warcraft and make a mod for that (it uses Lua). Actually that's probably a bad idea.
Maybe try to integrate Lua into a .NET application (assuming you are a C# programmer) and do something 'fun' with it:
Using Lua with C#
Or just browse lua.org
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Has anyone here given the Fantom programming language a whirl? (pun intended).
My first impression:
I like the ability to have the code run on either the .NET or Java VM.
The syntax is nice and clean and does not try anything fancy.
I have a belief that "the library is the language" and the developers of Fan believe that their USP is their APIs:
But getting a language to run on both Java and .NET is the easy part - in fact there are many solutions to this problem. The hard part is getting portable APIs. Fan provides a set of APIs which abstract away the Java and .NET APIs. We actually consider this one of Fan's primary benefits, because it gives us a chance to develop a suite of system APIs that are elegant and easy to use compared to the Java and .NET counter parts.
Any other thoughts, first impressions, pros and cons?
It looks very inspired by Ruby. It says that it's RESTful but I don't see how exactly. Compare with boo, which is more mature yet similar in many ways (its syntax is Python inspired, though).
The design decisions to keep generics and namespaces very limited are questionable.
I think their explanation sums it up:
"The primary reason we created Fan is
to write software that can seamlessly
run on both the Java VM and the .NET
CLR. The reality is that many software
organizations are committed to one or
the other of these platforms."
It doesn't look better than all other non-JVM/.NET languages. In the absence of any information about them (their blog is just an error page), I see no reason why they would necessarily get this righter than others. Every language starts out fairly elegant for the set of things it was designed for (though I see some awkwardness in the little Fan code I looked at just now) -- the real question is how well it scales to completely new things, and we simply don't know that yet.
But if your organization has a rule that "everything must run on our VM", then it may be an acceptable compromise for you.
You're giving up an awful lot just for VM independence. For example, yours is the first Fan question here on SO -- a couple orders of magnitude fewer than Lisp.
For what problem is Fan the best solution? Python and Ruby can already run on both VMs (or neither), have big communities and big libraries, and seem to be about the same level of abstraction, but are far more mature.
I have never heard of Fan until a couple of weeks ago. From the web site, it is about one year old so still pretty young and unproven. There are a couple of interesting points however: First the language is tackling the problem of concurrency by providing an actor model (similar to erlang) and by supporting immutable objects. Second, the object follows the example of Scala with type inference. Type inference allows the programmer to omit type declarations but have it computed by the compiler providing the advantage of short and cleaner code as in a dynamically type language while preserving the efficiency of a statically type language. And last, it seems like a very fast language, nearly as fast as Java and really close or beating the second fastest language on the JM: scala. Benchmark showing the performance can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/michael.galpin/performance-comparisons-of-dynamic-languages-on-the-java-virtual-machine?type=powerpoint.
This is very interesting.
Java (or C#) was created in order to eliminate Platform dependency by creating a JVM (or CLR) that will compile the code into a specific machine code at run time.
Now , There is a languege which is Virtual Machine independent? umm .... what the hell?!?!
Again , this is a very interesting topic , That might be the future...:) going to one universal single languege
I think it looks like a great language feature-wise, but I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't think it is all that useful to target .NET and JVM. Java is already cross-platform, and .NET is too, with Mono. By targeting two VMs, you have to use only the APIs that are available on both. You can't use any of the great native APIs that are available for Java and .NET. I can't imagine that their API is anywhere near as complete as either Java's of .NET's.
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My questions is simple!
Would you start learning Smalltalk if you had the time? Why? Why not?
Do you already know Smalltalk? Why would you recommend Smalltalk? Why not?
Personally I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer and I really like it. However, I'm thinking about Smalltalk because I read various blogs and some people are calling Ruby something like "Smalltalk Light". The second reason why I'm interested in Smalltalk is Seaside.
Maybe someone has made the same transition before?
EDIT: Actually, what got me most excited about Smalltalk/Seaside is the following Episode of WebDevRadio: Episode 52: Randal Schwartz on Seaside (among other things)
If you like Ruby you'll probably like Smalltalk. IIRC Seaside has been ported to the Gemstone VM, which is part of their Gemstone/S OODBMS. This has much better thread support than Ruby, so it is a better back-end for a high-volume system. This might be a good reason to take a close look at it.
Reasons to learn Smalltalk:
It's a really, really nice programming environment. Once you've got your head around it (it tends to be a bit of a culture shock for people used to C++ or Java) you'll find it to be a really good environment to work in. Even a really crappy smalltalk like the Old Digitalk ones I used is a remarkably pleasant system to use. Many of the old XP and O-O guru types like Kent Beck and Martin Fowler cut their teeth on Smalltalk back in the day and can occasionally be heard yearning for the good old days in public (Thanks to Frank Shearer for the citation, +1) - Agile development originated on this platform.
It's one of the most productive development platforms in history.
Several mature implementations exist and there's a surprisingly large code base out there. At one point it got quite trendy in financial market circles where developer productivity and time-to-market is quite a big deal. Up until the mid 1990s it was more or less the only game in town (With the possible exception of LISP) if you wanted a commercially supported high-level language that was suitable for application development.
Deployment is easy - just drop the image file in the appropriate directory.
Not really a reason, but the Gang of Four Book uses Smalltalk for quite a few of their examples.
Reasons not to learn Smalltalk:
It's something of a niche market. You may have trouble finding work. However if you are producing some sort of .com application where you own the servers this might not be an issue.
It's viewed as a legacy system by many. There is relatively little new development on the platform (although Seaside seems to be driving a bit of a renaissance).
It tends not to play nicely with traditional source control systems (at least as of the early-mid 90's when I used it). This may or may not still be the case.
It is somewhat insular and likes to play by itself. Python or Ruby are built for integration from the ground up and tend to be more promiscuous and thus easier to integrate with 3rd party software. However, various other more mainstream systems suffer from this type of insularity to a greater or lesser degree and that doesn't seem to impede their usage much.
Well, since you mentioned me by name, I feel I should chime in.
As I said in that podcast interview, and as I have repeatedly demonstrated in my blog at http://MethodsAndMessages.vox.com/, this is "the year of smalltalk". And having now done Smalltalk advocacy for the past ten months, I can see that it really is happening. More customers are turning to Smalltalk and Seaside, and the Smalltalk vendors are all working hard to capture this new influx of attention. More larger Smalltalk conferences are being planned. More job postings are being posted. More blog postings are being made.
If you turn to Smalltalk today, you are not alone. There are many others who are out there as well.
Edit
Well, a number of years later, I'm now recommending Dart instead. It's a great language originated by Google but now owned by an ECMA committee. It runs serverside in node.js style, but also clientside in modern browsers by transpiling to JavaScript. Lots of good books, blogs, help channels, IDE support, public live pastebin. I think it's definitely got legs... enough so that I'm writing courseware to teach it onsite or online, and I'm pretty sure there's a book or two in the works from me. And Gilad Bracha, an old-time Smalltalker is a major contributor to the design, so there's a lot of Smalltalk in Dart.
Smalltalk is a good language to learn, and the great thing is that it only takes a day to do it. It's a lot more than just an academic language. People are building huge, scalable, replicable applications handling billions of dollars. They just don't talk about it much. See, for instance, GemStone and Orient Overseas Container Lines:
A Shipping Industry Case Study.
Seaside is a good reason to learn Smalltalk, but I don't think you'll find it orders of magnitude better than Rails.
The thing that convinced me was GemStone. I really like Gemstone's GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Smalltalk, Seaside). The killer part of that is GemStone, which handles all the object persistence for you mostly without you thinking about it. Seeing some of their demos and hearing about what people are doing with GemStone reset my idea of what "big application" meant.
The part that bugs me the most about Rails is the object-relational mapping. That's nothing against Ruby because it sucks just as hard in GLORP (which handles ActiveRecord for Smalltalk), or Perl, or anything else. Mapping objects to database tables is just painful. With GemStone, thinking about the database disappears, so the work with the database disappears too. It's like a huge stone (or a troop of monkeys) is taken off my back.
> couldn't find a Smalltalk development environment that didn't cost both arms and a leg
Google - free smalltalk
Cincom Smalltalk, Squeak, GNU Smalltalk
Learning Smalltalk will give you a grounding in object oriented software development from the perspective of the man who invented OO (Alan Kay). The idea of a overlapping windowing environment came from Smalltalk.
A stumbling block to learning Smalltalk is that it is a message passing system with a strange syntax for flow control like:
i < 60
ifTrue: [ self walk ]
It has a very mature class library that has a consistency I've not seen too many places. The class library in all environments (even commercial Smalltalks) has available source which allows you to learn from the masters of the language. When programming Smalltalk, I always ask the question how is it done in the environment.
Smalltalk is generally implemented in an image which is a live environment for all the objects in your system.
The interactive debugger really seperates Smalltalk from Ruby.
Seaside is the web development framework and has given Smalltalk a new spotlight. It is a continuation based environment that allows for intra-hit debugging and a smooth Rich Client type development experience (top application flow can be designed in a single method). It's integration with script.aculo.us has been done in such a way that it is easily called from within Smalltalk.
Nigel, one quote I have is this:
Although it's now a long time since I did anything with it, I nominate Smalltalk, I still haven't come across anything quite like it for being able to transfer thoughts into computer code. It's not just the language: It's the wonderful browser environment, the libraries, and the culture of writing clear, well-designed code as quickly as anything else can crank out spaghetti. When the participants at JavaOne were extolling how Java was so much more productive than anything else, I needed a brown paper bag. Oh well, back to sorting out my classpaths... -- Martin Fowler (Software Development Magazine, Jan 2001)
I found it here.
Would disagree with the poster who reckons you wouldn’t use Smalltalk for large apps – that’s precisely where it shines. But I have created fairly groovy (note lowercase) prototype apps in under a week too.
I learned OO in ST starting in 92, incredibly glad I did so. It gave me a real background in OO. Thinking in classes. No types. ST has a real emphasis on messaging. If you want to know something send an object a message and get an answer. IMHO, the ethos and the IDE really encourage you to do the right thing with your coupling and cohesion.
In my Java day job, I’m stuck with files, generics, IDE’s like eclipse that are orders of magnitude less productive that any ST IDE. I was using ST the only time I finished a development ahead of schedule. In fact it was so productive, and we got so much reuse I had to be moved off to another project, as I had nothing to do! (Ok, maybe I could have spent time learning to estimate...)
Download squeak, find a good book and play. Only downside is that if your day gig is using Java or C#, you’ll end up wishing you could use ST. You’d get home sooner.
Chris Brooks
I recommend everybody to learn Lisp (Scheme) or Smalltalk.
Smalltalks have wonderful IDEs which you dont want to miss once you got over the culture shock. And yes, there are more than one free ones: Squeak, Dolphin, Smalltalk/X, and Visualworks (Non-Comercial).
Lisp may be even cleaner in its mathematic foundation, though.
regards
PS: actually I recommend learning both !
I do not know Ruby..
Smalltalk is a pure OO language. If you feel the need to really understand OO, and not just the simulated OO of most popular 'OO' languages (like C++, Java, etc), then I would recommend that you play with smalltalk.
In smalltalk everything is an object, with attributes, behavior and meta. In the simulations you have data types that you use in your objects.
I would say play with it, you will only benefit.
I'm totally in your shoes. Im using RoR and looking into Smalltalk land. Here's some pros & cons I find important:
Pros:
Mature & stable environment
Fast development cycle
Makes you think more and write less
Cons:
Requires different thinking
Still didn't quite grasp it
It's quite funny how I got to know about Smalltalk. It was this one thing that keept popping up in Google results when searching for Lisp and Erlang stuff. One day I checked it out and was amazed with nice windows environment. Few moments later I've found Aida/Web framework. I was hooked and started learning Smalltalk through web development with this framework.
Still not quite there, but it's so damn interesting I just can't sit still... :-) I'm having fun again.
Would not start learning it if I had the time. Why not? Because it would be more productive and lucrative financially to learn C# or Java.
On the other hand if your a hobbyist, and would like to go on an archeological dig, then I'd suggest spending some time looking at the What, When, Why and how of smalltalk by researching Alan Kay. Fascinating story and an incredible person (after all, he earned the Turning Award). Then maybe play with squeak a little to get a feeling for the language. After this you might have a newly found respect/understanding of blocks, closures, and Object Oriented principles.
I know and use Smalltalk, have for about 15 years, still maintaining it, and would not recommend Smalltalk to a friend. Why not? Employment is a good thing to have and keep getting. Although you can learn a lot from Smalltalk you can't easily turn that into gainfully being employed in this day and age.
Also, you appeared to be excited over Seaside and I would assume the Seaside/GemStone partnership. I've used GemStone for quite some time and the two together are very appealing. I hope they can get the market share and momentum required to be successful.
Don't! If you really start learning it, you might not want to programm in something else anymore ever.
This may be not true, if you are a lisp programmer.
Absolutely, learn Smalltalk! This is 2015 and Smalltalk is on the rise again, thanks to Pharo. Pharo is FREE. Pharo is evolving quickly into a powerful enterprise tool. At Version 4.0, and soon to be 5.0, it has matured a great deal in just four years!
Then there's Amber, which is Smalltalk for the web. It's also FREE and evolving quickly.
Despite Smalltalk's reputation, this is not your father's Smalltalk. Modern Smalltalk is exciting and promising.
It's true that Smalltalk jobs are not (yet) plentiful. But if enough of you aggregate to a new wave of Smalltalkers, then the industry will adapt to it and we'll see wider adoption of Smalltalk in business. The question is, do you have the vision?
I was taught Smalltalk in one of the first graduate college level Object-Orient Programming courses (circa 1988). The teacher thought it best to start was a "pure" OO langauge,before moving on to a more trendy one (we did a bit of C++ at the end of the semester).
By that measure, it's still best to start with pure OO, although these days we have Java & C#, both of which are "nearly-pure" OO -- close enough that you can get by ignoring the non-OO features of them, and limiting yourself to the Pure-OO subset of the langauges.
If you want a better understanding of Extreme Programming (and even Scrum) I'd say yes.
Why impatient Java programmers need to learn Smalltalk:
http://www.dafydd.net/archive/2010/why-smalltalk-isnt-just-another-language/
I've been a software engineer for quite a few years now. I've heard people bring up Smalltalk a few times, and certainly Smalltalk has been around since about 1980, but it's one of those languages that's never seemed to make it into the software mainstream. Sort of like Objective C, CLIPS, PL/I, etc--something you may have heard of, but something that most folks have never programmed in.
I probably wouldn't take the time to learn Smalltalk unless I needed to for a particular job. I looked at some Smalltalk tutorials and examples briefly a few years back, and it looks like it has some clear advantages for certain aspects of OO programming (like the message concept seems cool). But sadly, it is not mainstream, and doesn't seem to be gaining much momentum.
This thread has become very actual for me. I'm planning for a Software migration to a web-application. It's a database based software. I'm especially checking the alternatives
1) Rails
2) Seaside
If I can get the figures for the Gemstone/S as Database, I'll consider that also. So for me it means I have to learn Smalltalk (better) than before. Because it could be that it will be my work for the next 15 years. You would (and should not) work with software you don't like for that long ;-). I've the impression Gemstone/S is one of the "killer" applications. But persistence of Objects still is a very difficult field....
1) Yes! It's always good to learn a language. If you are going to learn a language, make it a powerful, influential language that can be learnt easily and quickly.
Smalltalk remains a pre-eminent language and environment for learning OO concepts.
It is all objects, all the way down. This makes for a really consistent approach to working.
Integers are instances of Class Integer. Strings are a collection of character objects. Classes are singleton instance objects for the class they define.
Control structures work by sending get messages to instances of Class Boolean.
Even anonymous methods (blocks of code, aka blocks) are objects.
Everything is done by sending a message to an object. The syntax can be fitted on a postcard.
The clarity of the concepts and their implementation in Smalltalk mean that you can develop ways of thought which transfer directly into Java, Ruby and C#. I expect it's true for Python, too.
It's so good for making the concepts clear that a major UK University used Smalltalk to train 5,000 people a year in object-oriented computing.
Squeak 5, has just been released. It has gained major performance increases from its new Cog/Spur VM, which features with progressive garbage-collection.
Pharo 4 has a lovely clean-looking desktop theme. The next version, Pharo 5, will be released soon. It will move to using the Cog/Spur VM, it will have about 5,000 classes in the release, and additional packages of classes are readily available from the net via the Configuration Browser tool.
Squeak 5 is performant even on first-gen Raspberry Pis, and is almost 50% faster on the new $5 Raspberry Pi zero. $99 buys you a Raspberry Pi 2, screen and case - running a mature, fully feature-complete IDE.
Leading edge research is being done on co-ordinated, distributed OO systems in Smalltalk (e.g. Naiad and Spoon).
Some of the world's largest corporate databases are run on Smalltalk - including tracking of 60% of the world's shipping containers, and trading systems in the world's largest bank.
You can use Smalltalk as a sort of super-powered CoffeeScript, writing in Amber Smalltalk and transpiling to JavaScript, running in the browser.
Squeak, Pharo, and Amber are all Free, Open-source, open-licenced languages and environments.
Squeak and Pharo provide write-once, run anywhere facilities for MacOS, Windows and Linux. (Possibly RiscOS, too).
Dolphin Smalltalk is targetted firmly at native Windows look-and-feel, and lets you compile closed .exes of your finished work for distribution to end users. Further development of Dolphin by the vendor has stopped, but it is completely functional, and, like all Smalltalks, designed to be massively extensible. (Did I mention that Pharo now has 5,000 classes, compared to Squeak's 3,000? Pharo is a fork of Squeak 3.9)
**There is a How-to guide for installing and starting Squeak, Amber, Pharo, Cuis and Dolphin at: **
http://beginningtosmalltalk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/how-to-get-smalltalk-up-and-running.html
The Seaside web framework runs on Squeak and on Pharo. It's a wonderful mature tool, as is the more traditional AidaWeb framework.
VisualAge, VisualWorks and Gemstone all provide enterprise-grade robust systems. Gemstone provides an infinitely scalable object database with transactions and persistence.
2) Yes - I do already use it.
I learnt it via the Open University, and was immediately productive in Ruby (a copy of the Pickaxe book and the library reference by my side). It helped me enormously with Java, and with Xerox Moo-code.
I have just returned to it to write apps to control manage and distribute responsive, massively multi-platform mobile apps.
I expect that soon I'll be re-writing my JavaScript mobile apps using Amber, too.
I don't really know what you're looking for.
If you are looking for a different language to write in, I'd think that would depend heavily on the libraries available. I know neither Ruby nor Smalltalk, but it seems likely that the most efficient way to write Ruby on Rails-sorts of applications may not be Smalltalk.
If you are looking to learn the ideas behind Ruby, this might be a very good move. I don't have anything quantitative, but I always felt better about using tools (such as language systems) if I knew more than just the tools, if I kmew the ideas behind them or how they worked.
If you want to learn different sorts of object-oriented languages, you might well want to learn Smalltalk (if it differs significantly from Ruby), something like Java or C++, and perhaps also the Common Lisp Object System.
If you just want to learn something different, Smalltalk may well be a good choice. I'd also suggest Common Lisp, and other people will doubtless have other suggestions (can you get a good Forth system nowadays?).
Yes, I'm interested in it. Tried to start once already, but couldn't find a Smalltalk development environment that didn't cost both arms and a leg.