Comment Re:Unadvantages! (Score 5, Interesting) 312
IMO the thing which crippled large Smalltalk projects was the corporate IT market embracing programming technologies which looked more like C. You had to fight hard to make Smalltalk code look like a procedural language, which a larger body of programmers were already used to. Java, C++, and C# look more like C, so I guess they have that going for them.
Smalltalk is a strongly-typed, late-binding language. Smalltalk's Object>>#doesNotUnderstand behavior is a hindrance for production-quality code only to the extent that your programmers are unwilling or unable to read and use someone else's API. Oh, and maybe your system design should not suck, no matter what programming technology is involved.
I worked for years as a Smalltalk programmer on big, corporate IT systems involving hundreds of programmers and handling hundreds of millions of $$$ per day in production, but corporate IT has had a mood swing and now our systems mostly use the early-binding programming technologies. I like being gainfully employed, but am not persuaded the tradeoffs of the extra code, convoluted syntax constructions, and tool paradigms actually represent any improvements. And finally, believe it or not, but the less senior programmers apparently have difficulty reading and understanding the code (even with its early-binding features) written by far more experienced programmers than myself, which in turn results in numerous and varied production defects. Who would have thunk it, eh?