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From: knight@acm.org (Alan Knight)
Subject: Re: Why Java and not Smalltalk
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Reply-To: knight@acm.org (Alan Knight)
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References: <goochb.202.0016DC40@rwi.com> <4cbjpi$kk6$2@mhadg.production.compuserve.com> <4ccljl$aof@newshost.lanl.gov> <4ce6rb$5mm@sundog.tiac.net> <4clvgf$27i@news.nstn.ca> <4cr5bf$86v@sundog.tiac.net>
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 03:33:06 GMT
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In <4cr5bf$86v@sundog.tiac.net> kinsella@tiac.net (Joe Kinsella) writes:
>Smalltalk's ability to define and enter a new markets is limited by
>their marketing dollars.  A handful of barely profitable $20-30
>million dollar companies do not translate into marketing clout.
>Several of the companies that have commited to Java post annual
>revenues in excess of $1 billion dollars.

This seems misleading. First of all, I'm not sure of the accuracy of
your statement about the size of the vendors. Certainly the combined
PPD is much larger than that, and they still have the money from
ParcPlace's public offering. I don't think IBM is offering statistics
on their sales. Second, you seem to be comparing the size of vendors
with the size of customers. Several of the companies that have
committed to Smalltalk post annual revenues in excess of $1 billion
dollars too.

>I believe it is very possible for a ST vendor or a third-party to
>provide a Java-like development environment.  But even if they did,
>what is the market for this product?  All the ST vendors combined
>could not muster a fraction of the marketing clout Sun stirred up with
>Java.  Also, ST vendors have no experience at penetrating a mass
>market.  They have content themselves to milk the market they have.

Don't forget that IBM is a Smalltalk vendor. I think they could manage
to muster a fair bit of clout if they set their minds to it. They
certainly have more than $20-30M revenues to work with if they decided
it was important to the company as a whole.

Actually, I believe all of this may be entirely insignificant. It
seems to me that Patrick Logan posted what may be the most exciting
Smalltalk news in a long time, and it passed almost entirely without
comment. He reported that Guy Steele is working at Sun to make the
Java VM capable of running Scheme. If it can run Scheme, it's got
closures and call/cc, which means it can effectively run Smalltalk
(there might be a couple of tricky operations left, like become:). All
of a sudden there _IS_ a Smalltalk VM on every desktop.

There does seem to be an attitude on the part of some Java enthusiasts
that they are destined to take over the world before ever releasing a
product. If you want to see some people who are much more annoyed
about this attitude than the Smalltalk community, check out the Perl
community. I was looking at mox.perl.com the other day for some
entirely non-computing information, and happened across links with
titles like "Java Ueber Alles". The attitude seems to be less of "Java
could seriously compete with Smalltalk" and more "Obviously, Java will
completely replace languages like Perl and Tcl/Tk".


(P.S. It's true. All net discussions
eventually degenerate into comparisons to Hitler).

-- 
 Alan Knight                | The Object People
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