@jdboyd@social.treehouse.systems
Post #3530738
2026-07-02 06:25 UTC
@slava@mathstodon.xyz
One thing I tend to find head scratching about modern open source Smalltalks is they all feel harder to get started with than they should be. Why don't they all ship with drop dead simple tools for working with Postgres, SQLite, REST APIs, combined with the ease of making forms in VB6, Access, or Django?
Replies (1)
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-02 06:42
@jdboyd@social.treehouse.systems @slava@mathstodon.xyz They’re all in the same mindset of Alto Smalltalk, which controlled the entire computer. Unfortunately, a lot of the power of Smalltalk (the image abstraction, live editing) comes from everything being in Smalltalk, which makes things like talking to a relational database a thing that immediately hurts. I used to work on this before concluding that the kind of safe interoperability between high-level languages suitable for end-user programming and large bodies of existing C/C++ code required new hardware. Since 2012, I’ve been working on making that new hardware a reality.