On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Ruby Maniac wrote:

> Once upon a time, Smalltalk was a commercially successful language....

Well, that's debatable. It all depends on where you set your bar;
Smalltalk was never all that widely deployed.

If measured by the number of dollars paid to programmers to write code
over any given period of time, I would not be suprised if at this point
Ruby is more "commerically successful" than Smalltalk ever was. It's
important not to forget that a vast amount of programming is done not to
make products which are sold to others but for internal consumption. In
fact, this appeared to me to be the majority of Smalltalk use.

> One of the problems with Smalltalk was the fact that source code had
> to be shipped with Smalltalk apps.

Actually, there were several implementations where it didn't; you could
build a system image and just ship that. It was likely more difficult to
reverse engineeer than Java bytecode.

At any rate, you could have a nice argument over whether this was
the biggest problem for commerical Smalltalk development. The vastly
different development and build control environment (particularly that
it was not file-based) could well have contributed more than that.

> Believe it or not, reverse engineering is a bit easier when you have
> full source to play with... I just thought I would toss this out for
> all of us to ponder.

No! Say it isn't so! None of us here had ever realized that!

Basically, distributing the source code just isn't that big a problem
for many people, and it seems to include you, or you would be using
another language, wouldn't you?

Every language has its tradeoffs, and if you're not happy with Ruby's,
you'd be far better off either fixing the problems (it is open source,
after all) or finding a language whose tradeoffs more suit you than
by ranting on a mailing list. I can say almost for certain that this
discussion will eat a lot of your time to no good end.

You might keep in mind that most of the Ruby developers are pretty well
aware of the problems with Ruby, and it's not because of their lack of
knowledge of these problems that they're not fixed. I leave it to you as
an exercise to find out why your pet peeves are not yet fixed.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs / cynic.net>         +81 90 7737 2974
              http://www.starling-software.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it.    --George Bernard Shaw