Musing out loud... [Why not Smalltalk?]

[Piercarlo Grandi]

>>> On Tue, 17 Apr 2001 22:02:17 -0400, "Eric Clayberg"
>>> <clayberg at instantiations.com> said:

clayberg> "Piercarlo Grandi" <pg_nh at sabi.Clara.co.UK> wrote in message
clayberg> news:yf366g3awne.fsf at sabi.ClaraNET.co.UK...

[ ... ]

pg> Thus I find it a bit bizarre to imagine that "it took the Anamorphic
pg> team to pull them all together and prove that they worked in
pg> concert", because the Self group not only largely developed them,
pg> but they did that themselves (actually it was mostly just one guy
pg> for the Smalltalk-80 clone) and in the most straightforward way
pg> possible.

clayberg> Then explain why Sun bought Anamorphic and their HotSpot
clayberg> technology for *several* tens of millions of dollars. If Sun
clayberg> already had all this in house, they had no reason to buy
clayberg> HotSpot.

This argument is based on the premise that the relevant people at Sun
knew what they were doing. Well, lots of companies buy other companies
for huge prices without any good reason to do so.

  This is by the way a variant of the ``Microsoft client choice''
  argument: ``if 90% of PC users pay good money for Microsoft product
  the only possible reason is that they are much much better than any
  other'' (Microsoft did use this type of argument in the trial).

clayberg> Were you around when the Anamorphic team was shopping HotSpot
clayberg> around to the highest bidder? Did you see their technology in
clayberg> action?  I think you are severely underestimating the
clayberg> significance of what the Anamorphic/HotSpot team
clayberg> developed. Apparently Sun did not...

This is just handwaving, or worse: it sounds like insinuating that I
have in some way passed judgement on Anamorphic's stuff.

Well, I don't think that I have underestimated anything about
Anamorphic; I haven't (IIRC) emitted any opinion as to whether their
stuff worked or not or was significant or not.

I have just stated the easily checked _fact_ that the Self research
group did themeselves the "pull them all together and prove that they
worked in concert" act themselves for their adaptive compilation
technology, and it was quite a good act, so whatever the significance of
Anamorphic's stuff is, it's not that it was a singular achievement of
Anamorphic's, contrarily to what is stated here:

  clayberg> [ ... ] Several of the ideas for HotSpot originated with Self (or
  clayberg> were well known in the literature), but it took the
  clayberg> Anamorphic team to pull them all together and prove that
  clayberg> they worked in concert. [ ... ]

I know very little about what Anamorphic developed, so I am prepared to
believe that they did eventually achieve results similar to or perhaps
even better than those of the Self team, and that they were highly
significant; but not uniquely significant, as the Self team themselves
used those ideas and managed to "pull them all together and prove that
they worked in concert", indeed quite easily, glaringly, publically so.

Also, in the case of the Self team I don't have to resort to faith; the
demonstration that their stuff works, and works well, "all together" and
"in concert" is well known, published, and can even be downloaded.

PS: perhaps I should have mentioned this before: I have met Mario
    Wolczko long ago (but haven't seen him for a few years) and quite I
    liked him and his work, so perhaps I am a bit biased by this, and I
    was really pleased with his demonstration that clever compilation
    technology can do a lot of good to Smalltalk-80, but I guess that
    the facts about the whole Self team are clear enough, biased or not.