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From: jordan@cruzio.com (Jordan Bortz)
Subject: Re: Despairing Columnists Go Over the Edge
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Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 18:01:43 GMT
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Well, before you all start sending nasty messages to Peter Coffee ---

I've talked to Peter before -- he is a nice guy.  We got Peter to
write about the Tigre Programming Environment back in 1990/1991 when
noone knew what Smalltalk was and Peter wrote nice things about it.

Peter also wrote a lot of very nice things about VSE 3.01 when it came
out, calling it the "best development" environment for Win32...

He's definitely not anti Smalltalk, and I think he's disappointed
about the turn of events at PP-D...

Jordan

knight@acm.org (Alan Knight) wrote:


>The very question begs the question, "Better at doing what, for whom and
>in what environment?" When ParcPlace-Digitalk says, as a flat assertion,
>that Java is winning on perception rather than merit, it's saying that
>only its current customers are capable of intelligent choice. This is
>not a good starting point for a strategy of long-range growth.

I think this is a cogent observation

>It might be more useful to ask, specifically, in what ways Java does
>surpass Smalltalk. It uses less memory, it offers higher performance,
>and it mixes a judiciously chosen set of efficient and rigorously
"Real Smalltalkers know thats irrelevant or not! The important thing
is to be buying Smalltalk, not noting its deficiencies!"


