Hi Elliot! When I rethink, why new programming languages came up from zero to a significant market share, like PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby, JAVA, C# (.net) Visual Basic, Visual C++ and others died out, like Delphi, TurboBasic/Pascal/C I could name different reasons:
- Free license vs. expensive - Wrong payment model (per developer, per runtime, both) - Good, free support on websites vs. "Bronze/silver/gold" paystupid-support - Attractiveness of one "killer app" that made programmers change to another language - Portability of code onto other platforms - Mightyness of libraries - Missing standards, protocols, support of hardware - Good vs. bad marketing, deciders not convinced that product will survive/missing timeline, visions, lack of money in background - Subcritical mass of programmers using product, lack of professionals That was in former times. Today, new criterias play a far more relevant role, hat haven't really existed just 3 years ago: - Has it (the OS,the programming language and GUI framework) an appstore/plugin concept to let free, creative brains being able to participate, earn money with? - Barrier - free payment model included (mobile payment, card, bank account)? - Free use with sponsoring by ads possible (programmers payed from multiple resources, not user alone) - Cryptographic prevention of missuse included? - Free and matured SDK available? - Connections to social software like facebook/twitter/Google+/Groupon included (API access, programming language and all protocols supported) - GUI designed for desktop as well usable for touch and self adapting to different screen/touch sizes? - Touch gestures possible and lib avail? - Microsofts Kinect hardware/video recognition of faces, hand/face mimic gestures possible and supported in libs? - Voice recognition supported? - Mobile ready? (touch, GPS, compass, barometer, gyro, hardware OpenGL) - Rockstable? - Fast, running in low power devices? Joule per clock cycle ratio??? - Critical mass of users already reached, increasing? - Critical number of apps there to raise interest? ... So, the Pharo developers might now decide, what to invest their brainpower into! :-) Just my 2ct. Guido Stepken Am 27.01.2012 19:46 schrieb "Eliot Miranda" <[email protected]>: > > > On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Marcus Denker <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> On Jan 27, 2012, at 6:13 AM, dimitris chloupis wrote: >> >> > This article is really encapsulates the attitude and what is wrong with >> programming in general. The attitude of superiority and intelligence that >> seems to plague coders and being the biggest obstacle to progress. >> >> Yes! The "Everyone is dumb but me" phenomenon... >> >> What those "intelligent" people don't get is that complexity is >> inherently exponential. So even if you are >> 10 times more intelligent than me (very well possible), it is >> *completely* irrelevant considering that complexity >> grows non-linearly. >> >> If you combine this with the notion of Evolution: that it is impossible >> to creat "the perfect" out of nothing, yet >> entropy grows when you incrementally improve things... than this has some >> very serious consequences. >> >> > For me the main problem with is the whole aura of "elitism" , what >> better example than Lisp, where beginners are attacked and be excluded. >> >> We had the same effect in Squeak at the end. No progress, every >> improvement was actively fighted against, if needed with the nice argument >> that >> one can do it even better, and only "the best" is worth for Squeak. >> >> Another thing that "intelligent" people don't get is that critizising is >> trivial: You can *always* do better, there is no perfection. It's an >> endless process. >> This implies that one has to accept and embrace imperfection if one wants >> to have a future. Else you end up never finishing anything, the death of any >> incremental progress. >> > > But criticism is essential. How does one identify a mistake if not by > criticising? There's a huge difference between constructive criticism > (analysis, testing, comparison, evaluation, measurement) and negativity > (denial, fear, slander). How can one engineer without measurement, without > thought? Being agile doesn't imply being random. Evolution measures, and > most harshly; the weaker don't survive. > > >> Pharo was started with the explicit goal to do as many mistakes as >> possible, as fast as possible. >> >> Marcus >> >> -- >> Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de >> >> >> > > > -- > best, > Eliot > >
