If they were trying to sell their environment to the PC programmer demographic, then their marketing was definitely mistargeted, but I never considered the utility was obvious to them rather than the whole thing being an academic exercise.

IBM wasn’t selling to developers. SOM was first and foremost targeting PHB’s, who were on a mission to solve the “software crisis”. We somehow managed to easily escape that one despite no one coming up with a silver bullet solution.

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mananaysiempre 3 days ago | parent [-]

I admit to having no experience with this particular model year of PHB. Were they really that prone to being dazzled with seemingly advanced shinies? All of the metaclass talk must have sounded like a stream of meaningless technobabble if you weren’t not just a practicing programmer, but also up to date on the more research-oriented side of things (Smalltalk, CLOS, et al.).

The talk was meaningful, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t see how it could sell anything to a non-technical audience.

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twoodfin 3 days ago | parent [-]

What I mean is that the SOM feature checklist was downstream of trying to sell “software components” as a means of turning development shops into “software factories” to an audience of PHB’s.

CORBA had a ton of “technobabble”, too: It wasn’t there to make the standard better for developers.

	▲	pjmlp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but since this stuff comes in cycles, now we have WebAssembly Component Model, with gRPC predating it. And I would vouch that REST/GraphQL with SaaS products, finally managed to achieve that vision of software factories, nowadays a big part of my work is connecting SaaS products, e.g. fronted in some place, maybe with a couple of microservices, plugged with CMS, ecommerce, payment, marketing, and notifications based SaaS products.