The Sophie project site reports that Sophie 2.0 will be in java in order to be browser based.
Was Strongtalk considered? To think what could have been accomplished if Curl, the language, had been an option! Next I suppose I will hear that Croquet or Cobalt has left Squeak for Scala. It must be a typo. The must have mean Gears and JavaScript V8.
You can get Sophie 1.0.4 here and learn about the Future-of-the-book here.
Over the years I have seen 2 expert systems running in PROLOG rewritten by teams looking to use their FoxBase or their java skills so this should not surprise me. After all, the book will no longer contain text or the text will not be in UNICODE strings so why use a text-focused language with graphics. Or were ICON, UNICON or REBOL deemed more obscure than Squeak? Here's my tip: prototype Sophie 3.0 in Curl using the any type with all preprocessing directives turned at the lowest levels. Then implement it in your most effective language based on your project's developer pool.
Perhaps what they were choosing was not the language but the VM, and in that case the JVM would not be a bad choice if the CINCOM Smalltalk VM was not available for the terms of their license. But by the time 2.0 is released, they could well have made a major contribution to Clean Slate Smalltalk, or Strongtalk, or Self, or Io. And in a project such as this, Scala with traits would look to be a natural given the prospects of major refactoring in the future of the project (traits are to refactoring as were classes to OOP components.) Ok. Not a word about Rebol. Well, maybe one word: a project such as this needs to have the types on the side of the values, not the slots. What has been termed "cash instead of personal checks". Chapter the last.
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Using Sopie 1.0.4 on linux is an eye-opener. The 2 startup features are highlighting and sticky notes. Go to save or retrieve and the app does not know that you are at home in a folder under multimedia.
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Go to open another book: it forgets that you are already in a books folder. It will show you ZIP's and allow you to select a zip but gives no indication of what OK meant. Unzipped? where? Book? Where? And the book sizes are humongous. Somewhere this project went very wrong.
A prototype in Dolphin Smalltalk might have seen them right. Or in Curl. As it stands, how could this match Foxit ? The feature count is so low and the features fail on usability (This is not 1.0, this is 1.0.4) This should not happen in Smalltalk, whether Squeak or otherwise. Such very good things have come from the Squeak community in recent years that this is hard to understand. Immensely disappointing. Totally underwhelmed.
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