Simula VS asyncgo

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.

The meta object concept of Python (both the 2 and 3 version) is rather different than the one of Smalltalk-80. Actually Smalltalk-76 and 80 have more in common with Simula (67) than the first Smalltalk (72) version. I implemented both Simula 67 and Smalltalk-80 (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula/). Smalltalk implemented a lot of great ideas, but its influence on other languages (such as Python, Java, C++, etc.) is generally overestimated.

I built something similar. It didn’t really work as a business (or at least I wasn’t able to make it work) so I open sourced it: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo

If there’s anything useful there feel free to scavenge, or if you’d like to talk about what I learned trying to build it let me know.

I made an async work collaboration app: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo

I had been working at GitLab, pre-pandemic, for several years and I saw how writing things down was almost like a super power to enable async work. If you start with time zone distributed teams, writing things down in issues/docs just becomes the natural way of working. I also saw that lots of companies didn't really get it - and there was a leap of faith required to try it, because it didn't logically follow that if you write things down more you can have less meetings.

My idea was to build something that provided a really natural place to write things down, and I built and tried to sell AsyncGo as a place for making decisions in a written way. You'd set a topic, a context, and a due date, and then the magic would happen. In theory. The problem I had was that I couldn't find anyone to take the leap and try it. Companies who were interested in async already had some similar process, and the ones who needed it didn't get it and I never found a way to communicate it clearly.

In the end I shut down the hosted version and put an MIT license on it. I don't regret it exactly, I learned a lot making it, but I wish it had helped more people. There's other stuff out there now that's sort of similar, and it seems they are struggling a bit as well, so I don't think the market was really there (yet).