This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: More on Why Smalltalk Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I started this as a comment to this post, but I decided to just post it once it started getting long.

The point we are trying to make is simple - all libraries, from all vendors, have issues and limitations. Pick a Java library or a .NET library, and you are pretty much stuck with the limitations. In many cases, some bozo library designer has declared it perfect for all time and made it final, so you can't even subclass it. Other times, usage of specific classes is hardcoded so that it's not practical to subclass even if you can

When confronted with this, you end up having to re-invent a lot of the supposedly reusable vendor code. Every Java application I've ever heard of has their own private String libraries to deal with this. The beauty of Smalltalk, in this case, is that we can overcome the limitations of the library without heroic efforts. I've made a number of such changes in BottomFeeder - in many cases, new releases have obviated my changes and I've removed them. But I didn't have to either:

• Live with the limitations until the next release
• Create my own parallel set of code that solves the issue

Instead, I've had to make small tweaks here and there - easily monitored, versioned off, and eliminated when necessary. That's one of the things VisualWorks would lose if we integrated into .NET (or Java) the way some people suggest. If we used "off the shelf" platform libraries, then the ability to modify them when we needed to would disappear. Here, go read this post for an example of what I'm talking about - Troy "enjoys" those .NET facilities every day :)

I indented that to make it clear that I was responding to the referenced comment. It's not that reusing existing facilities has no value - clearly, it empowers developers to "stand on the shoulders" of others. However, VisualWorks (the Smalltalk implementation being discussed here) is cross platform (which obviates total integration with .NET), and is dynamic (which obviates the JVM as a platform choice, since its support for dynamic languages is very sub-par. Yes, Jython esists. It's also much slower than it should be).