Those who misremember history...

In Dynamic Languages Strike Back, Steve Yegge says

StrongTalk was really interesting. They added a static type system, an optional static type system on top of Smalltalk that sped it up like 20x, or maybe it was 12x.

Why do people make this stuff up? The following two statements are true:

1. Strongtalk has an optional static type system.
2. Strongtalk is 15-20x faster than most other Smalltalk systems.

What's false is the causal link Steve is claiming between them. They are entirely independent. Strongtalk was that much faster whether you used the optional static type system or not. Strongtalk's optimizing compiler completely ignored the types, and it made your program run not one iota faster to add them.

Update: see also Dave Griswold onStrongtalk's history:

... we had a type system and a compilation technology, which together were perfectly suited for a great production Smalltalk system, since they were independent of each other. This independence was critical, since the system would need to accept untyped as well as typed code, so that people could use the type system as much or as little as they wanted to, without impacting performance.

Comments

[JS]

Avi,
Would you care to try and justify your statement with something more than you saying so?

[jon]

@JS: what's to justify? He's stating a fact!

[Nick Smith]

From the Strongtalk.org home page:

"Fortunately, Sun Microsystems has graciously released Strongtalk as completely free, open-source software. The first release from Sun in 2002 did not include source code for the virtual-machine (which contains the compiler). Only the binary was released, rendering the system unsuitable for any serious use, other than evaluation by researchers. As of September 2006, this has been remedied with the new release, which contains full source. "

Wow!... is there any work in progress to implement Squeak on the Strongtalk VM? That would be an incredibly language.

[marc]

I guess a part of the scepticism towards (or against?) Strongtalk stems that Smalltalk was more popular. I feel that these days neither of those two are as strong as they used to be within a "programmer community".