Hi, On the issue of families of technologies (Lisp and Linux), I see that the article's conclusion doesn't work well in the languages front, as it does on the operative systems one. If you replace the title with Lisp's successor or Linux's successor, the articles conclusion changes, because of the way families of Linux distributions and Lips variants evolve. So you can say that because the diversity of Linux distributions, we don't need (yet) a Linux's successor, while you can say that, because of the diversity of Lisp languages, we already have in fact several Lisp's successors (Racket, Clojure and so on), all of them recognizing their Lisp lineage, but trying to improve and evolve on specific fields (By the way a worthy mention on your list would be Cuis Smalltalk).
I see that your articles tend to reiterate the same points time and again about Smalltalk (historicity, simplicity, agility, proven record), which can be fine for a new comer to it, but gets old for the people who is actually engaging with reading you. Blog title changes, addressed a particular point and comes back to the repeated arguments in favor of Smalltalk and then it retakes the starting point with a conclusion. Maybe you could create a single page where you can point your readers, with companion images, videos and notes and just mention briefly the favorable points of Smalltalk for a blog newcomer with a link to your reiterated detailed arguments. With reiteration covered, you may be willing to consider some blind spots which are present (and of course are part of any writing process as they represent a point of view). I know that popularity is the main motive behind the Smalltalk Renaissance efforts, but addressing the blind spots in the search for popularity, could be useful to consider: how popular is popular enough? In a world which values popularity so much (particularly in places of the Global North) which are the disadvantages of popularity? Can a community have the "proper size" to move quickly enough and have good support and funding? Which business and needs are well served disregarding of choosing popular technologies? Just as a thought experiment, as the ones you ask to your non Smalltalk readers to consider options beyond the ones they persue, If popularity is not the best place to focus effort, which could be a good place to do it? Thanks for the conversation, Offray On 10/08/20 8:07 p. m., horrido wrote: > It's true, Smalltalk faces the same dilemma as Linux and Lisp. As a /family/ > of languages, portability is a genuine issue. > > There's no getting around this dichotomy. You can have either a flexibility > of choice or the tyranny of one standard, but not both. > > The decision is a fact of life that we face frequently. You can have either > the flexibility of dynamic typing or the safety of static typing, but not > both. You can have either the natural modelling of the real world due to > state mutation or the mathematical safety of immutability, but not both. You > can have either the portability of a virtual machine or the > close-to-the-metal performance of native code generation, but not both (JIT > compilation notwithstanding). > > Life is about choices. There will always be a place for different > technologies. Smalltalk will not always be the ideal choice. That's why > there are five entirely different languages that dominate our industry > (Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, C++). > > There is no reason why there can't be a sixth, especially if it can > dramatically improve our productivity and make programming less cognitively > stressful. Surely, that's worth fighting for. > > Enough? > > > > Richard O'Keefe wrote >> Here is a challenge: What is "Smalltalk"? >> VAST, VW, and Pharo are quite different environments. >> To the extent that they share a common syntax (which >> they don't, quite), fine, but porting nontrivial >> code between them is NOT easy. They certainly have >> very little in common as GUI kits. All praise and >> thanks to the people who *have* ported stuff. >> >> >> On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 01:05, Richard Kenneth Eng < >> horrido.hobbies@ >> > >> wrote: >> >>> https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/08/10/smalltalks-successor/ >>> >>> A bold claim. It'll be interesting to see if anybody challenges me on >>> this. >>> >>> > > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html >
