Talk:ParcPlace Systems

Martini (talk) 20:19, 19 February 2018 (CET)

There had been a request to fix this article and remove some of the "unsupported opinions".

From: "Allan M. Schiffman"

To: ktk

Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 20:24:51 -0800

Subject: Errors in http://www.edm2.com/index.php/ParcPlace_Systems

Hi,

I was googling for ParcPlace Systems and came across the page http://www.edm2.com/index.php/ParcPlace_Systems

It’s not important, of course, but I noticed many errors (or at least unsupported opinions) that annoyed me. So, for what it’s worth, here’s my take. I was the VP of Technology of ParcPlace from its founding until I left in 1991.

0. The “T” in “Smalltalk” isn’t capitalized, never was.

1. The initial product was called “ObjectWorks\Smalltalk”, not “VisualWorks”. The name was changed to VisualWorks some two years later.

2. I don’t know who the “informatics community” is referring to such that its opinion was that the system was “the weakest", but I doubt such an opinion is reliable or generally held. The ParcPlace product was derived from the original Smalltalk-80 system developed at Xerox PARC which pioneered, beginning in 1984, "just-in-time compilation” (then called Dynamic Translation”) to machine code and “in-line caching”, innovations which are now used in most programming language implementations. The only other commercially available Smalltalk system at the time “Smalltalk V” a 16-bit interpreter from Digitalk, which, because of I286’s platform memory constraints of the time had a much less complete class library and fewer development tools, and being interpreted, was far slower. The Parcplace implementations were, by benchmarks published in several academically-reviewed papers, the fastest Smalltalk implementations from the first version in 1984 through the acquisition by Cincom in 1999.

3. As to the “horrible documentation and support”, I’d like to see a reference or two. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, ParcPlace’s documentation and support was superior to the under-capitalized competition. The product won several awards for “best product”; its tutorial and reference manual were used in several University programming courses.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_caching https://web.archive.org/web/20040618105930/http://webpages.charter.net/allanms/popl84.pdf https://goo.gl/XP3Grt https://goo.gl/w9HqDM

Feel free to ignore this message.

Thanks, -Allan