PharoJS is working to give you that mobile app/browser app experience.  As
with others, we're not there yet, but getting there.  See http://pharojs.org

The 67% loved means that 67% of people using Smalltalk (or perhaps have
ever used it) want to continue - so it's presumably a high percentage of a
smallish number of people.

On 20 October 2017 at 03:23, jtuc...@objektfabrik.de <
jtuc...@objektfabrik.de> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          mailto:jtuc...@objektfabrik.de
> Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de
> D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com
> Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1
>
>
>

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