I disagree, it really was the image concept, or very specifically how it was created and maintained over time.

A docker container is composed typically of underlying components. You can cowboy it for sure, but the intent is to have a composable system.

The Smalltalk image resulted from the developer just banging on the system.

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isr 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Except that's not really what happened. You're ignoring the range of in-image tools which kept track if who did what, where. From versioning of individual methods, to full blown distributed version control systems, which predated git.

Not to sound harsh or gatekeep, but folks who keep repeating the canard that "The Smalltalk image resulted from the developer just banging on the system", mostly never used smalltalk in the first place.

Give the original smalltalk devs some credit for knowing how to track code development over time.

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Scubabear68 13 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I haven't ignored those tools. They were all stop-gaps that worked in a "meh" way to various degrees. Smalltalk was always optimized to one guy banging away on their solution. Add a second developer and things got much hairier, and more so as you kept adding them.

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isr 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm, well I don't know exactly when Monticello was first developed, but it was certainly in heavy use by the early 2000s. How is that "meh" when compared to ... cvs & subversion?

I don't know much about the systems used in commercial smalltalks of the 90s, but I'm sure they weren't "meh" either (others more knowledgeable than me about them can chime in).

image-centric development is seductive (I'm guilty). But the main issue isn't "we don't know what code got put where, and by whom". There were sophisticated tools available almost from the get go for that.

Its more a problem of dependencies not being pruned, because someone, somewhere wants to use it. So lots of stuff remained in the "blessed" image (I'm only referring to squeak here) which really ought not to have been in the standard distribution. And because it was there, some other unrelated project further down the line used a class here, a class there.

So when you later realise it needed to be pruned, it wasn't that easy.

But nevertheless, it was still done. Witness cuis.

In other words, it was a cultural problem, not a tooling problem. It's not that squeak had too few ways of persisting & distributing code - it had too many.

IMHO, the main problem was never the image, or lack of tools. It was lack of modularisation. All classes existed in the same global namespace. A clean implementation of modules early on would have been nice.

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igouy 10 hours ago | parent [-]

1988 "An Overview of Modular Smalltalk"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/62084.62095

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wild_egg 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A Smalltalk with all reflexivity removed just sounds pointless, no?

	▲	igouy 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The point would have been different.

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isr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting. Shows how aware they were of these 2025 criticisms, way back in the 80s (which shows how much of an oversimplification these criticisms are of the real situation).

You probably already know about this, but in case you didn't, there is 1 project which adds modules to cuis Smalltalk:

http://haver.klix.ch/index.html