What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/21/2015 7:16 PM, Mario Figueiredo wrote:
> In article <873873ae91.fsf at jester.gateway.sonic.net>,
> no.email at nospam.invalid says...
>>
>> Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:
>>> In 2009, Robert Martin gave a talk at RailsConf titled "What Killed
>>> Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby"...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0
>>
>> That's an hour-long video; could someone who's watched it give a brief
>> summary?
>>
>
> In a nutshell, he argues, along with Ward Cunningham, that what killed
> Smalltalk was how easy you could create unclean code with it. "Unclean"
> in this context means Smalltalk didn't punish bad software design
> decisions that would eventually lead into complex code and unmanageable
> systems with zero options of code maintenance.

He followed that by saying that fine-grained test-driven development is 
the way to prevent unholy messes.  He noted that tdd started in 
smalltalk, but never really took there.

Reason 2: arrogance -- the walled garden and disdain for the messy 
problems of real enterprises. He did not seem as sure about how to 
counteract this.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy