Section :: Rants and Raves

Farewell Dolphin Smalltalk

by Huw Collingbourne

Sad news...

Saturday 11 August 2007.

I’m sad to hear that the superb Dolphin Smalltalk is no longer being developed. I’ve used Dolphin Smalltalk on and off over quite a few years and have also written tutorials and features on it for Bitwise Magazine and on my software company’s blog. It’s a lovely product - even by Smalltalk standards - but it seems that commercial realities have meant that continued development is not an option...

Andy Bower, of Object Arts, announced this in the Dolphin Smalltalk newsgroup yesterday...

“We will continue to distribute the free version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely but, as from today, we will not be selling the Professional version. Some limited support will remain in place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).”

What a shame to see such a great product fade away like this.... At least, there is the free version. I encourage you all to download and use it. It will help you to understand why this is such sad news.

The Object Arts Web Site
Future development of Dolphin discontinued (blog entry)
Download Free Edition of Dolphin Smalltalk

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Forum

Farewell Dolphin Smalltalk
6 September 2007

You may be interested in the campaign to save Dolphin Smalltalk by buying it out and open sourcing it.

See the Future of Dolphin Survey link for more information.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/co...

You can also e-mail

davorin.rusevljan@gmail.com

with the subject Dolphin Shelter to join the campaign to save this marvellous development environment.

Future of Dolphin Survey
Farewell Dolphin Smalltalk
15 August 2007

Looks like Smalltalk is just too weird for the programming mainstream and these days a language just can’t hope to be taken seriously unless it’s got curcly braces (one just has to wonder why is it that the very same people that are so enarmoured of the curcly braces are at the same time so irritated by lots of small parenthesis). The only thing I fail to understand is why Andy Bower and co are so firmly opposed to open sourcing Dolphin, who knows, at the end of the day it migh have increased the number of their customers from 500 to 550 or even to a whopping 600. On a more serios note, yeah it’s sad news but not really surprising though.