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From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@virginia.edu>
Subject: Correct timelines [was: Reply to Ousterhout's reply ]
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Cc: cosc19z5@bayou.uh.edu, python-list@cwi.nl, "John Ousterhout" 
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On Wed, Apr 9, 1997 8:03 PM, cosc19z5@bayou.uh.edu
<mailto:cosc19z5@bayou.uh.edu> wrote:
>John Ousterhout (ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com) wrote:
>
JO>: In contrast, various flavors of Lisp have been around since at least
JO>: the early 60's and Smalltalk first appeared in the late 60's.  
>
>I was under the impression that Smalltalk first appeared in the early
>70s.  
>

As one of the greybeards (literally) in this group, I have to correct you
both on your history: 

  Smalltalk was being developed at Xerox in the 70s, but except for a 
few academics, it was pretty much unknown outside of PARC. 

  By the mid seventies they had something that would be recognizably
close to today's Smalltalk. Steve Job's came to PARC in 79 and left
impressed ( and then launched work on the Lisa ). 

  BYTE magazine came out with an issue devoted to Smalltalk in 81 --
that's was the first most people heard of it . [ YES -- in those days,
before internet news connections were ubiquitous, computer magazines
were still a source of "timely" information, and you didn't learn about 
the latest computer research or new language the very next day! ] 

  I bought copies of the first books that came out on Smalltalk-80 
in 1983.  The books were much easier to get than were any working
systems -- one of the books "SMALLTALK-80 : Bits of History, Words
of Advice" was mostly reports from various groups that had tried to
port it. [ You got a tape image of byte codes for the Smalltalk 
virtual machine -- you had to build your own virtual machine to load it. 
This was also in the days before C became the "universal assembler" . ] 
It was difficult to fit it onto the machines of those days. [ Our main
machine when I was at UPENN was a VAX 750 with the maximum 8MB 
memory. ] Most of the implementation reports in that book did not
lead to a commercial product.

  Anyone know when the first commercial Smalltalk for PC was released ? 

  In any case, it can't be *too* far off to say that Smalltalk has been
widely
available only for perhaps less than a decade. 

[ This from my greying memory,  my ancient copies of 
 Krasner,Glenn SMALLTALK-80 : Bits of History, Words of Advice.  &
 Goldberg & Robinson - SMALLTALK-80: The Language and its 
 Implementations  ( both published in 1983 ) and Alan Kays talk in 
 HOPL-II ( ed. Bergin & Gibson ).  ]

JO>: Every single
JO>: programmer who ever wrote a program in Tcl, Perl, C++, Visual Basic, 
JO>:or even C could have chosen Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk.  
>
>Here you show a grievous lack of common sense that goes well with your
>lack of knowledge about language-history.  The only programmers who
>would be able to choose Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk are those who
>would have known that those languages existed, and you would be
>surprised at how many people do _NOT_ know they exist.  I ran into
>these languages because I was _ACTIVELY_ looking for languages,
>this is the same reason I ran into Haskell (my favorite language).
> [ ... ] 

There is a recent article in the New Yorker about HDTV, pollution 
regulation and technological development, which knocks the notion
that the market can always make the right technology choices -- an
idea that supposes that individuals have perfect knowledge of the 
possible choices. That line goes back to Simon's studies on decision
making with imperfect information. The sort of simple minded 
market economy argument John Ousterhout uses has become our
ages version of Social Darwinism. 


JO>: But they didn't.  If you
JO>: want to know the truth, I think you need to stop making superficial 
JO>: excuses and ask deeper semantic questions.  

I'm afraid I have to agree with Erik Naggum's reply here:

Erik> the way I read this debate, people are asking deep, semantic
questions of
Erik> Tcl and they get superficial excuses for answers.


>Let's see, C became popular for one reason only -- it was almost
>mandatory for programming under Unix which was widespread (and
>still is).  So C rode on the coattails of an operating system, and
>was not chosen on any virtue of the language itself.  

I think you're off on your history here also. 
Going back in time about 20 years:
   My friends who did business computing systems used Cobol, BAL
( IBM's BAsic Assembler for 360/370 systems ) and were starting to
use 4GL Database languages where performance and other constraints
allowed. 
   Everyone I knew in the University used Fortran and some assembler -
mostly on PDP-11s and VAXen -- running RSX11, RT-11 and VMS. 
Unix was just starting to make inroads then. 
   On smaller systems: embedded LSI-11's and early PCs we used FORTH
or Basic. 
 [ Lisp systems were very incompatible before Common Lisp came around.
   I had trouble learning it because none of the Lisp's I had access to
  matched the syntax of any of the Lisp books I had ( and they didn't 
  match each other, either. We got VAX Common Lisp on our 750, 
  but it was a pig on an 8MB time shared machine. Several companies --
 I remember GE and some others -- had some success using Lisp 
  machines for prototyping and development of expert systems, which
 they then ported to FORTH for delivery. ] 

 C basically filled a need and a vacuum. 
 "Standard" Pascal was not very usable, and usable Pascal's were not very
standard.  Pascal was designed as a teching language -- so even it's 
adoption showed the hunger for something better. I used Ratfor 
( a preprocessor for Fortran which added some of the features of 
  C  ) for a while.  C had and has its faults, but at the time it was
the best thing available. ( as well as Forth, which filled a rather
different niche. In fact, it gave you all of the benefits and more 
of Tcl, 20 years ago. ).
  Pascal, for all *it's* faults, was neck and neck with C for a while --
especially after Apple chose Pascal for the Mac and Turbo Pascal
became a defacto PC standard.  I think Unix and it's close association
with C, the Unix philosophy of programming which spread beyond
Unix by things like Ratfor and books like "Software Tools" , and 
finally, Gnu C allowing C compiler backends for every possible 
processor to become available, probably gave C a big boost, but 
it would be wildly incorrect to say that it's all due to Unix. It 
really seemed like the best solution at the time.   


> C++ is
>popular for one reason only -- it isn't a far step away from C which
>means that the C crowd flock to it in safety.  So C++ rode on the
>coattails of C which rode on the coattails of Unix.

As Steve McQueen says in The Magnificent Seven: 

  "Reminds me of a feller I once knew -- took off all his clothes
  and jumped into a patch of cactus. When they fished him out
  and fixed him up, they asked him why he did it." 

 "He said: 'IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME! ' " 


Tcl also seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Long Ago, when I was contemplating moving from an LSI-11 running 
Forth to a 68000 Unix system, I talked to a programmer in the lab upstairs 
who was running Unix system 7 on a PDP-11. I told him that what
I liked about Forth was that I could write new primitive commands
for things like "x y MOVE-BEAM" and 'ACQUIRE-SPECTRUM' ,
and use them and the basic Forth commands to write simple scripts,
test them interactively and do new experiments almost as fast as I
could think of them. 

He said: Oh -- that's simple in Unix! There are these tools called Lex
and Yacc you use to write your own command  language. You write a 
grammar for your language and write the primitive commands in C . 

Needless to say, it was not anywhere as simple, easy or fast as what
I had had before. So when I first read John Ousterhout's first Tcl paper,
I though: *Finally* -- something almost as simple as what I had years
ago. But it's a bit of a distortion to write about it as if you've
discovered
some new revolutionary concept in programming languages: Interactivity! 


>As for Tcl, it's there for one reason and one reason only -- strong
>corporate backing.  

As other have already noted in this thread -- Tcl was developed long
before John Ousterhout was at Sun and it grew without any corporate
backing. Even at Sun, compared to Java, it's getting more what I would
call benign corporate neglect. 


- Steve Majewski
<sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>

"Twenty years in the computer business, and all I got to show for
 it is this Python T-shirt!"   ;-) 





