mwnorman2

Whenever this story (and all the related stories about PARC) re-surface, I am (writing now in late 2026) mostly sad about the incredible language that should have 'won' .. well .. everything!

The term 'footgun' unfortunately matches all too well: something so great, so powerful yet most of the time, even in the hands of well-intended folks, proceeds to shoot oneself in the foot. I was for more than a decade a professional Smalltalk developer (Telecommunications, Financial/Derivatives) but we were replaced by technically inferior systems, mostly Java, JavaScript and even VisualBasic. The HR person at the Financial company explained (after my exit interview!) that for the cost of a single Smalltalk developer, they could hire 4 or 5 lesser experienced programmers (less cognizant of how systems actually worked!). The HR folks preferred these hires: more selection, cheaper . etc. Sigh!

Am I a horrible person to enjoy so much (schadenfreude!) the upcoming AI/LLM footgun massacre?

Well, I DID live through that era and I AM the 'old-man-yelling-at-clouds' ;-) and the main issue was that getting Smalltalk developers was a HUGE headache. I worked for a Telecom company (Canada's largest, rhymes with 'Ortel') and we needed to develop our own courses - yours truly developed and delivered dozens of hours of training.

This lead to some extraordinary per-diem charges that I knew some folks enjoyed for a while, mostly paid for by the Financial industry. Eventually those on the paying side looked for cheaper alternatives .. and yes, the new-kid-on-the-block Java played a big role, but so did Visual Basic!

Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!

We had at least 1 PERQ at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980's A friend of mine was helping the local IT folks set it up - arranging to read a 9" tape of PERQ's BitBlit software. A bunch of us wanted to see the machine first-hand but lowly undergrads didn't have access to the lab-room. But, wait ... is that acoustic tile above the door jam, only half-way across? Gimme a boost ... skinniest guy goes up and over ... we can SEE ;-)

Not only does Waterloo have a world-class C-&-O department, they also had a hero from Bletchley Park - Dr William Tutte, a kind gentle genius that never bragged about his accomplishments (he didn't talk about it, even to his family!) He broke the 'Lorenz' cipher (generally regarded as much more difficult than Enigma) Almost all modern Graph-theory and Matroid analysis is built on his work. --- Mike Norman, B.Math UofW 1986

The CS industry is rather cyclical - during the early phase of some 'hot new thing' (OOP, Internet, currently AI/Machine Learning) folks will employee anyone that can help. After some period of time, folks will want proof you can help: degrees, diplomas, certifications, etc. Currently you can use the free/almost-free resources on the Internet to replicate most of a 4-yr (Bachelor) CS degree ... when/what part of the cycle are you in? Do you have the time and/or money to sit yerself down for 4 years?

Your choice ...

I am avoiding diets because they only end up with me gaining more weight further down the road.

Everyone remember the 'Biggest Loser' show? Turns out some researchers followed-up with a statistically- significant sample size of contestants, a little less than 200. About 93% re-gained their weight after the show (> 1yr) and of that 93%, half gained back MORE than they lost (around 10% more). The show gave contestants access to great food, exercise, trainers, diet counselling ... on a per-person basis this was thousands and thousands of dollars that most people can never afford to spend themselves - and STILL the outcome was ... gain more weight :-(

Edging closer and closer to the idea that the only choice now is surgery (scares the HECK out of me!)

I left the Smalltalk world years ago (for Java ... hmm was it a win?) but the thing I miss the most is ... reading great code. Within the Smalltalk image/IDE, everyday you read code that other folks - many with brains much much bigger than mine - have written, and its great. A lot of the code I read now (Java,Objective-C) is ... err ... brain hurt :-(

In my opinion, the industry wavers back and forth on CS degree or just 'git-er-done'. I remember the early computer 'craze' (1970's) when all you had to do was open a company called "Compu-NNNN" and money would flow. Later, people wanted to see diplomas, degrees, certifications so then lots of folks when to school: undergrad, or grad-school if you already had undergrad degree. Now, things are a bit different: information as well as the opportunity to acquire skills is global, no one place is 'ahead' of the other

My advice: choose a path you are comfortable with in terms of time, money.

I left a little more than 5 years ago ... I cannot fully explain how much ... lighter I felt after. I went to work with a cloud (ha!) over my head everyday for the previous oh 8 years of an almost 10-stint. I was contacted by an Oracle employee to recruit me back about 3 years after I left - I fired off a two page email explaining the poor ethics, the horrendous ways people were/are treated ... sadly to no avail, I couldn't get him to leave and get his life back.

I was part of the team that developed TopLink, later EclipseLink that became the reference implementation of JPA. After I left Oracle, almost all of the original 30+ Engineers/QA/Managers were moved to a different project. The git-repo is infrequently updated by only a few support Engineers. From my point-of-view this means that the de-facto Java ORM is Hibernate (even though we were first!). It is very mature, well-tested yet still getting some 'love' (c.f. recent changes for Java 8 streams).

Other posters have mentioned the 'Vietnam of CS' post from many years ago - the main message I would like to highlight is that ORM's are deceptive: it appears easy to create one, but once you spend some time with how people actually use databases, the real-world starts to drag you down (the 'leaky abstraction' meme thrown around). An example of this is: how many ways are there to map a One-to-One relationship (hint: greater than 5)