Bruce Hobbs writes:
> "He reported that he sees repeatedly a 10-20 fold increase
> in productivity
> with Smalltalk over C++ in comparable teams within HP
> working on the same
> type of software in both languages (mostly middleware)."
[snip]
> At one of the roundtables during the last IPROF I asked when
> HP Distributed Smalltalk would be available on the 3000
> platform. The response was mainly some puzzled looks. (I got
> the distinct feeling that most of the HP folks didn't even
> know their company has a Smalltalk while some of those who
> did weren't really sure what it was!) A couple of months ago
> I saw a demo of the product and spoke with an HP employee
> who privately told me that he had seen the product running
> on a 3000.
 
HP's Distributed Smalltalk is a set of classes for implementing CORBA
compatible applications in Smalltalk.  It is itself implemented in
ParcPlace's VisualWorks version of Smalltalk.  So it requires a
platform that already supports VisualWorks (Unix workstations, Mac,
Windows, possibly more).  It's very GUI intensive, so an HP3000
version would probably be a port of the Unix version using X as
the interface.  This would be less than optimal from a perfomance
and accesibility standpoint.
 
Smalltalk is a wonderful thing. I would love to see an optimized
Smalltalk system embedded into MPE at a low level. Most Smalltalks
run as a completely separate environment and don't 'play well with
others'. This greatly limits their ability to be used as general
purpose tools. You either write everything in Smalltalk or nothing.
 
Take a look at Python as an intermediate between the evils of C++
and the pure object approach of Smalltalk.  One of Pyhton's biggest
advantages over Smalltalk is that it is free (and already runs on
the 3000), while there is no really usable free Smalltalk.
 
http://www.python.org/
 
G.
 
P.S. Everyone should be keeping an eye on Sun's new Java language. It
     is going to become a defacto standard for distributed
     transportable code (initially being used for downloadable WWW
     code for web browsers) in 'agents' and other stuff. It is
     basically C++.