First of all: I'd say the question itself is not a question but an
excuse. I am not arguing there are enough Smalltalkers or cheap ones.
But I think the question is just a way of saying "we don't want to do it
for reasons that we ourselves cannot really express". If you are a good
developer, learning Smalltalk is easy. If you are a good developer
you've heard the sentence "we've taken the goos parts from x,y,z and
Smalltalk" at least twice a year. So you most likely would like to learn
it anyways.
A shortage of developers doesn't exist. What exists is an unwillingness
of companies to get people trained in a technology. If Smalltalk was
cool and great in their opinion, they wouldn't care. It's that simple.
As a consultant, I've heard that argument so often. Not ferom Startups,
but from insurance companies, Banks or Car manufacturers who spend
millions on useless, endless meetings and stuff instead of just hiring
somebody to teach a couple of developers Smalltalk. It's just a lie: the
shortage of Smalltalk developers is not a problem.
And, to be honest: what is it we actually are better in by using Smalltalk?
Can we build cool looking web apps in extremely short time? No.
Can we build mobile Apps with little effort? No.
Does our Smalltalk ship lots of great libraries for all kinds of things
that are not availabel in similar quality in any other language?
Are we lying when we say we are so extremely over-productive as compared
to other languages?
I know, all that live debugging stuff and such is great and it is much
faster to find & fix a bug in Smalltalk than in any other environment
I've used so far. But that is really only true for business code. When I
need to connect to things or want to build a modern GUI or a web
application with a great look&feel, I am nowhere near productive,
because I simply have to build my own stuff or learn how to use other
external resources. If I want to build something for a mobile device, I
will only hear that somebody somewhere has done it before. No docs, no
proof, no ready-made tool for me.
Shortage of developers is not really the problem. If Smalltalk was as
cool as we like to make ourselves believe, this problem would be
non-existent. If somebody took out their iPad and told an audience: "We
did this in Smalltalk in 40% of the time it would have taken in Swift",
and if that something was a must-have for people, things would be much
easier. But nobody has.
I am absolutely over-exaggerating, because I make my living with an SaaS
product written in Smalltalk (not Pharo). I have lots of fun with
Smalltalk and - as you - am convince that many parts of what we've done
so far would've taken much longer or even be impossible in other
languages. But the advantage was eaten by our extremely steep learning
curve for web technologies and for building something that works almost
as well as tools like Angular or jQuery Mobile.
Smalltalk is cool, and the day somebody shows me something like Google's
flutter in Smalltalk, I am ready to bet a lot on a bright future for
Smalltalk. But until then, I'd say these arguments about productivity
are just us trying to make ourselves believe we're still the top of the
food chain. We've done that for almost thirty years now and still aren't
ready to stop it. But we've been lying to ourselves and still do so.
I don't think there is a point in discussing about the usefulness of a
language using an argument like the number or ready-made developers.
That is just an argument they know you can't win. The real question is
and should be: what is the benefit of using Smalltalk. Our productivity
argument is a lie as soon as we have to build something that uses or
runs on technology that has been invented after 1990.
Okay, shoot ;-)
Joachim
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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuc...@objektfabrik.de
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