Petr,
I've been working as a Consultant for many big corporations (mainly in
VA Smalltalk) since 1996. The situation you describe is very well known
to me. But in my opinion there is no technical reason for this. It's a
managerial problem. Ever since IBM went out to their customers and told
them to move to Java for the better ini the mid-90ies, managers wanted
the Smalltalk projects to go away as fast as possible. Nobody asked why
IBM was still happily using VisualAge Smalltalk internally at that time
frame....
So the Smalltalk projects were declared legacy by Management.
Replacement projects were started with big efforts and optimism. Some
went well, some somewhat came to fly in a bit more than double the time
and much more times the costthan planned, some failed miserably. One
thing was in common to the replacement projects all over the place: they
took much longer, turned out to be much mor complicated and took a lot
more manpower than anybody had ever imagined.
So two important things happened:
1) People were told the old Smalltalk stuff would be gone soon, so if
you wanted to be a valued and appreciated staff member, you better stay
away from these projects
2) The people who knew the business and technical side of the existing
projects were moved to the new projects. Some liked it (because of 1)
some were frustrated (because they knew / feared the new project was
going to be a death march)
Over the first 2 years or so, nobody realized how bad the situation
really was. It was easy to postpone user requirements to the new
project, accumulate more and more manpower in the new project and still
keep up green flags everywhere.
...until yellow was the new green and users/stakeholders wanted the new
features NOW - and not one day when the replacement project would become
real.
So the remaining manpower in the old project (not the ones with lots of
experience and knowledge) had to extend the old system, integrate it
with the new system (thereby implementing all the stuff that IBM once
told their management would never be possible in Smalltalk) and keep it
up and ranning year after year. Nobody ever said Thank You or would
appreciate the work they did. Because that was old stuff anyways and was
already irrelevant.
Some of these old systems still exist today, serving users every single
day, while some of the new systems never appeared. No manpower was ever
added to these projects, and never would anybody ever say: okay, guys,
you won. They still work on legacy code and try to do their best to
fulfill user requirements. While on other projects that never see the
light of day, people get appreciation, are allowed to work with new
technologies and do cool stuff. Nobody ever asked the Smalltalkers
whether they could do that as well, because "if you want to do web, you
need to do Java". IBM said so, you know (and many other consultants as
well).
So this is why new people try to stay away from these old projects. This
is why the remaining staff is frustrated and this is why nobody allows
them to do the cool things that Smalltalk can do as well as the others.
They are just required to fix bugs, add new features in the old GUIs and
else keep silent. Some of them were trying to fight this and tried to
prove Smalltalk's strengths, but back then nobody would listen. One day
they gave up.
Management still frustrates people every. single. day.
Just my opinion
Joachim
Am 22.10.17 um 18:56 schrieb Petr Fischer:
Here. (But from one point of view, it's a litte misery, 10-20 year old code
sometimes, a mess, old VAST, absolutely no interest from young colleagues with
no experience to willingly learn something about Smalltalk etc etc.).
If I bring up enough arguments, we will use Gemstone+Pharo tools in the future,
which is a dream for me... but, we will see...
pf
At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15523807
the question is asked... "Does anyone on here program in Smalltalk
professionally? Not to get off topic, but I'm curious and would like to
know how it stacks up compared to what they did previously? "
If you've earning a living from programming Smalltalk, please drop a
comment there.
cheers -ben
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