[View] [Edit] [Lock] [References] [Attachments] [History] [Home] [Changes] [Search] [Help]
DIY Smalltalk
A "DIY Smalltalk" (Do It Yourself Smalltalk) is a modern support and attitude for Smalltalk development.
Smalltalk has been defined in the '80s as a machinery to support software development in an Object Environment.
The software architecture required a "virtual machine" to load and execute the object environment in a real computer. The requirement of a VM to start execution and development was not a major problem at that time. The software industry was based in closed-source development and it was not an issue for developers and companies not to have control of the sources of the VM (black box schema).
The world has changed A LOT from those times, and actually (2021), there are decades of history about smalltalk use in the provider-customer ages of development.
The problems of being constrained to the initial architecture of Smalltalk are well known... we have been conditioned by the speed and interest of providers to push Smalltalk to new platforms and enhance "their" VMs.
The actual world of business and software development, based on open source technologies and resources, is not moving to Smalltalk world. Most Smalltalkers are waiting for a new provider and/or a benign VM holder that will give them custom/fast/nice VMs to run Smalltalk, and make money from that business (selling Smalltalk VMs).
A change in attitude is required to produce a modern Smalltalk (do not expect a change if you insit doing the same). The world has changed, and now we need to update our Smalltalk concepts and replace the parts of initial smalltalk design that are obsolete.
The S8 platform, is a DoIt Yourself Smalltalk platform. It is based on the technical facts that we can load/run and do Smalltalk development without a custom smalltalk VM (the S8 smalltalk kernel run on top of javascript and Lua VMs).
It has been 11 years of development of S8, now running on multiple platforms/devices. We have been running on top of execution engines designed for other languages exploiting the convenience of running on modern platforms WITHOUT waiting for someone to do the dirty stuff to implement a smalltalk VM.
The DIY attitude is a new requirement for S8 developers.
We want to be running Smalltalk anywhere and we want it just now.
To make it possible we have a network of known S8 developers doing social development and sharing expertise & resources, to move to the platform of choice to run your objects.
cheers,
Ale.