https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-of-advice.html "I'm told ParcPlace declined an offer from Sun Microsystems to allow ParcPlace Smalltalk to be distributed on Sun workstations. Sun would pay a per machine license fee, but it was nowhere near what ParcPlace was used to charging."

Sounds much like the Lisp Curse.

@Konrad Hinsen That’s what the second commenter says too. I hadn’t heard about The Lisp Curse before and can only recommend reading it right after: http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html I find the message of The Lisp Curse mich more useful then the slightly whiny article about Smalltalk. I had never looked at what comes with the power of being able to fit the whole programming system into your head — when you alone can do anything, there’s no need for collaboration. But to build something that is appreciated by many, you need the diversity of a team.

That second commenter is me 😃 There is one aspect missing in the Lisp Curse, and also its Smalltalk variant: both languages predate the Internet. Before the internet, collaboration was difficult to establish. Both finding collaborators and interacting with them was much more difficult than it is today. I suspect that this is why Clojure escaped the Lisp Curse, in spite of sharing all the features that were supposed to encourage it in Common Lisp.

reminds me of https://twitter.com/shriramkmurthi/status/1261268107164897280?s=21

People propose new languages all the time. The arguments in favor of the new languages often revolve around increased expressive power, or conciseness, or new buzzwords. But to businesses and government entities which provide most of the employment in the field, their overriding concern is for stability, and transferability. Time and time again, the industry consensus has been to select the worst, most verbose language available, that had the perception of being easy to understand. LISP, which permits, some would say encourages, very sneaky metalinguistic abstraction practices, is well known to be "write-only" language, so regardless of its positive attributes has been shunned for 50 years (and probably rightly so). Python has crept up into the top 3 due to merit; it is reasonably compact, and reasonably easy to read. I used Modula-2 which was the 10 year later sequel to Pascal. It was superior to C in every single aspect except popularity. It generates faster, smaller more compact, more readable programs, and its feature set has 100% correspondence with C, and adds dozens of error-reducing compile-time and runtime checks against dumb errors like nil pointers, array bounds checks, and conversion errors. I could not get a single person to convert to Modula-2 in 20 years because everyone was in thrall to Microsoft's dominance. Whatever MS did was the law, and people were afraid to buck the behemoth's practices. Now i look back and see the probably close to 100,000 security patches that have had to be applied to MS's code base, all because stupid C doesn't have NIL pointer or runtime range checks. The amount of wasted time spend downloading and installing these patches, none of which would have been necessary had MS used a more robust language. And let's not forget that the people working as programmers many of which are paid by the hour, have a perverse incentive to use the most troublesome language available. Programming is one of the few fields where people are paid full wages to fix their own errors. A building contractor, when he screws up, often has to pay with free labor to fix their mistakes, while programmers typically earn 75%+ of their total income from fixing their own mistakes. Not a pretty picture that one.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project You are the first person I hear mentioning Modula 2 in many decades. I used Modula 2 as my main language on the Atari ST eons ago, then switched to C because the people I worked with insisted on using C because everybody uses C.

Its good to see gilads post discussed here. The reference to Docker should be at least intriguing to many people. Alan Kay was not joking when he said: computing has turned into a Pop Culture