[F-Script-talk] Fwd: OT: The Object People

[Alun ap R. <al...@ma...>]

(sorry moderator, I keep forgetting which email address I used to 
register!)
Philippe wrote:
> Interesting to know that your are an ex-Object People, which at some
> point was sort of a mythical company in the object-oriented world. I
> remember I was kind of fascinated by this company and its Toplink
> product.
Yes, it was a great company to work for, unique in my experience. For 
those who don't know, it was sold to BEA with the idea that it would be 
the training arm of that company. John Pugh could see that Smalltalk's 
days as a major money earner were numbered, I guess. However, BEA was a 
very different company to work for. They immediately stopped all 
Smalltalk projects (I was doing development for a health insurance 
company at the time in the middle east) and stopped us teaching any 
Smalltalk courses. Everything had to be Java and using their products. 
TOPLink was sold off to a separate subsidiary, which then went bust and 
TOPLink was finally acquired by Oracle. I left about 4 months after the 
takeover, and I think everyone in the UK left within a year, ditto in 
Canada and no doubt elsewhere. With Bloomsbury also closing up, it 
became hard to get training for Smalltalk, certainly in the UK, and I 
think that may have hastened the drop in number of companies using 
Smalltalk, along with IBM becoming luke-warm about their VisualAge 
product.
	However, once you have spent time with Smalltalk it is hard to become 
enthused about anything as far below it as Java (though Ruby is really 
nice), so it wouldn't surprise me if some other ex-TOP people were 
using F-Script. I have only been using it for about 6 weeks, and it is 
noticeable how I now look for any chance to drop into it. The main 
reason it remains as short snippets at the moment (although those 
snippets do a lot of work) is because it would be hard to debug larger 
pieces of code. Harder to read, too, as I can't split the code up into 
lines very easily, either embedded in ObjC code or in the interpreter 
view.

regards,

Alun ap Rhisiart