> > Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.
Squeak/Pharo and Smalltalk in general never took off (and it’s unlikely they ever will) because of this mindset.
I dabbled a bit with pharo and this mindset became evident pretty much immediately.
The thing is: for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty runtimes (think smp/threading, high-throughput or low-latency i/o, network protocols support etc). But the OS is generally great in that sense.
Smalltalk is nice but it will never get past the “toy language” phase with that attitude.
Also: in terms of object database Versant OODBMS is much better :P
This very much depends on your definition of ‘best’. While your criticisms of the environment are valid, smalltalk is flexible in tangible ways that Java couldn’t match. Java took the OO model of smalltalk and make a bunch compromises that had big negative impacts on the language that are still there today.
Smalltalk was (and still is in some places) successful because of its portability, flexibility, etc. while it hasn’t enjoyed the degree of success as Java, ruby, perl, python, C++, and friends it would be a mistake to call it just a you.
Squeak/Pharo and Smalltalk in general never took off (and it’s unlikely they ever will) because of this mindset.
I dabbled a bit with pharo and this mindset became evident pretty much immediately.
The thing is: for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty runtimes (think smp/threading, high-throughput or low-latency i/o, network protocols support etc). But the OS is generally great in that sense.
Smalltalk is nice but it will never get past the “toy language” phase with that attitude.
Also: in terms of object database Versant OODBMS is much better :P