Hi esteban
we need to be much much better one talking to external libraries.
Our esteban is working on it.
Stef
Le 23/7/15 18:52, Esteban A. Maringolo a écrit :
Peter,
At your joung age you might have very good reasons to have chosen
Pharo over anything else as I did a lot of years ago. I discovered
Smaltalk by chance when I was 21 years old and already had my years
developing with Perl and was starting to learn Java. Fortunately I
started making a living out of it since I was 22 until today.
But if you want to make the community bigger you have to look into why
people don't chose it, otherwise we'll be "preaching to the choir" as
we many times are.
These days FP is on the bull trend, having been there way before than
Smalltalk (Lisp, Haskell, etc. and their reincarnations Clojure,
Scala...). What makes them popular most of the times is not the
techology per se, but who uses it.
Regards!
Esteban A. Maringolo
2015-07-23 13:06 GMT-03:00 Peter Uhnák <i.uh...@gmail.com
<mailto:i.uh...@gmail.com>>:
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo
<emaring...@gmail.com <mailto:emaring...@gmail.com>> wrote:
When I talk to "new programmers" (20-25 years old), almost all
of them don't get attracted by it.
Why? I couldn't tell. Mainly because they can't use the few
tools/patterns they already learnt how to, barely, use.
As someone who (still) falls into this range I see several
(unrelated) reasons why they might not like it.
For me personally I encountered Pharo in University in "Conceptual
modeling" class, where it was introduced pretty much as "Oh, by
the way, here is this completely new environment that you've never
seen nor worked with that we will use, but we will not tell you
much about it"... so my first experience was quite awful. I
mean... I couldn't even write the code in my favorite text editor
and I had to use this weird browser where system code and my own
code were mangled up. Image crashing meant I lost my work. Now I
know I can just replay changes but I didn't know it back then (the
focus of the class was modeling, not Pharo). Bugs (this was Pharo
2 (and 3 beta)) were commonplace and since I had no experience I
couldn't tell whether it was my fault or the system's fault... it
was overall very unpleasant.
I later (after the course) basically foced myself to look at Pharo
again because I didn't understand why would people bother to use
it... so clearly there must have been some value I've missed. And
I don't regret that decision a bit, but I had to go look for it.
So statistically speaking from the year I did the class only two
or three students (to my knowledge) kept their interest out of 119
(so 2-3% maybe). Other years were no different.
Next year there will be a dedicated class for Pharo so I'm curious
if this will change somehow.
But there may be other reasons why students may not like it...
(looking again from my experience)
From university experience perspective, the previous year (for us,
and from what I talked with people it's not that different also
for other universities) was a heavy massage in C and C++ where we
were implementing very basic concepts (hashtables, and other data
structures). A year where your main concern was to pass a
automated checking system... so mostly memory management and
creating write-only code. Plus warped concepts of OOP (so to use
actual student quotes: "C++ is great for explaining OOP", "You can
do OOP in pure C", or "OOP is useless, long confusing code, full
of getters and setters, .. and slow. Inline assembler is much
faster"). So with such concepts it's hard to give them OOP
language, because they already made up their mind.
Yet another reason I can see might be that when you are young you
are more inclined to follow what's cool and modern and popular and
shit (or has the word "game" in its name).
So if today's world revolves around connectivity, internet,
JavaScript and whatnot, then giving them a isolated environment
with non-mainstream technology and a dead language they've never
heard of (I thought that Smalltalk was an obscure language that
died in '80s, before I found that actually it's alive and doing
quite well) will not be met well with appreciation.
But no reason to stop there... there market for Smalltalk is
arguably small, so people will prefer language that is in demand
by the market (after all, I pay my bills with
JavaScript/PHP/webstuff, and not Pharo; because it's much easier
to find a job; with Pharo I would have to basically start my own
business to be profitable and then I would be doing business and
not programming).
And last (but not least), finding support for it is much harder,
since the community is smaller. So it's almost all or nothing
scenario.
Also some of the arguments here can be applied also for functional
programming (which I haven't (shame on me) even engaged with,
besides messing with Haskell in XMonad (and multi-paradigm
languages that have some functional concepts).
Finally I don't think that you should expect the same behavior
from young people (<26) as from adults. They will have different
values, views, and whatnot... I mean that's the point of growing
up and acquiring experience. All you can do is offer this
alternative option and provide support. Being mainstream or
non-mainstream is akin to self-fulfilling prophecy. (Of course
exceptions happen, JavaScript was raised to glory because the
language happen to be in the right place (browser) at the right
time (boom of modern web)).
Hmm... and this post ended up being much chaotic and longer than I
intended to... but whatever.
Peter
p.s.: I like the music analogy since I was listening to k-pop
while working (webtech), and now I am listening to ambient music
when writing about Pharo :p
