Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas


On 10/01/20 1:52 p. m., horrido wrote:
> Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote
>> But I have not
>> being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo
>> instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language
>> they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.
>>
>> So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is
>> better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing
>> new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in
>> Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems.
>> Bridging both is pretty difficult.
> Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing
> Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I
> mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the
> built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize
> is *programmer productivity*.
>
> I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java, Python,
> JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's
> hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and
> IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that
> Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better.
>
> What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half?
> It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter
> "time to market."
>
> Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the
> job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your
> IT infrastructure.
>
> The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't
> believe it, then we have failed.
>
I have invested time and energy in Smalltalk. Since 2014 I have
organized 500+ hours of workshops and hackathons which lead us to our
local success story [1].

[1]
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/Docs/En/success-story.md

But, from that experience, I see pretty difficult that coders which are
already using other languages and frameworks for their daily jobs, use
Pharo/Smalltalk when precisely their jobs is to maintain and extend the
stuff that they are already using. I have had better experience with non
coders (i.e: librarians, journalists and so on), presenting such "new"
ideas and practices. Grafoscopio is suited at non-coders that don't mind
to code or are curious about coding, but they need to intertwine code
with prose, data and visualization.

I think that a place where coders and non-coders can meet is at Blue
Ocean places (that's why I'm starting to explore Scuttlebutt protocol).
Can we start to find such blue oceans to explore together in a playful
and practical sense, where we can showcase the advantages of
Pharo/Smalltalk ? That could be a pretty good advocacy.

Cheers,

Offray







Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread horrido
This is exactly why I also push Smalltalk's simplicity. In the 1970s, Per
Brinch Hansen posited that a small, simple language would lead to fewer
programmer errors. The result of his work was the Edison programming
language. It was published in his book, "Programming a Personal Computer,"
which is one of my favourite programming books.

Of course, Per Brinch Hansen wasn't alone in this belief. It was also shared
by Niklaus Wirth who created Pascal and Oberon.

So it's not just Smalltalk's live programming environment that we should
herald. The size and simplicity of the language is a big deal.



Richard Sargent wrote
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 1:52 PM horrido <

> horrido.hobbies@

> > wrote:
> 
>> Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote
>> > But I have not
>> > being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo
>> > instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language
>> > they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.
>> >
>> > So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is
>> > better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing
>> > new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in
>> > Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems.
>> > Bridging both is pretty difficult.
>>
>> Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing
>> Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I
>> mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the
>> built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize
>> is *programmer productivity*.
>>
>> I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java,
>> Python,
>> JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's
>> hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and
>> IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that
>> Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better.
>>
>> What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half?
>> It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter
>> "time to market."
>>
> 
> It also means much lower error rates. Capers Jones also review errors /
> lines of code and Smalltalk was substantially better than the C derivative
> languages. I don't recall the ration, but I think the Namcook report does
> include it.
> 
> Fewer errors means a higher ratio of time spent delivering functionality
> and a better customer experience. (We can't do anything about bad design
> and UX practices, of course and unfortunately. Although, I suspect without
> evidence that Smalltalkers may do a better job of both.)
> 
> 
>> Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the
>> job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your
>> IT infrastructure.
>>
>> The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't
>> believe it, then we have failed.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>>
>>





--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Richard Sargent
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 1:52 PM horrido  wrote:

> Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote
> > But I have not
> > being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo
> > instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language
> > they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.
> >
> > So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is
> > better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing
> > new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in
> > Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems.
> > Bridging both is pretty difficult.
>
> Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing
> Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I
> mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the
> built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize
> is *programmer productivity*.
>
> I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java,
> Python,
> JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's
> hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and
> IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that
> Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better.
>
> What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half?
> It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter
> "time to market."
>

It also means much lower error rates. Capers Jones also review errors /
lines of code and Smalltalk was substantially better than the C derivative
languages. I don't recall the ration, but I think the Namcook report does
include it.

Fewer errors means a higher ratio of time spent delivering functionality
and a better customer experience. (We can't do anything about bad design
and UX practices, of course and unfortunately. Although, I suspect without
evidence that Smalltalkers may do a better job of both.)


> Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the
> job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your
> IT infrastructure.
>
> The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't
> believe it, then we have failed.
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>
>


Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread horrido
Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote
> But I have not
> being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo
> instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language
> they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.
> 
> So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is
> better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing
> new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in
> Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems.
> Bridging both is pretty difficult.

Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing
Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I
mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the
built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize
is *programmer productivity*.

I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java, Python,
JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's
hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and
IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that
Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better.

What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half?
It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter
"time to market."

Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the
job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your
IT infrastructure.

The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't
believe it, then we have failed.



--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas
Hi,

(I don't know if there is a netiquete rule of _this list_ about
top-posting inter-posting or bottom-posting, so I will start here).

Is good to see a thread like those with different points, so thanks to
all participants. I agree with several of them.

I think that Smalltalk advocacy is important, but it happens in
different ways, some write prose for that, some code, some both.

In my case, Smalltalk has the strongest point by blurring the frontier
between separate concerns: language, IDE, tools, writing/execution time
and is an experience that may other computing environments, frameworks
and languages are trying to bring (see Svelte, DarkLang, Elm, Clojure
and so on). I still think that the way Smalltalk blurs concerns and the
live coding experience it creates by doing so, is unbeatable. But the
way Smalltalk expose its advantages works in particular domains
(research, prototyping) and not so well in others (mobile) where others
are delivering more and faster apps for the developer and user.

In my case, Smalltalk environments, particularly Pharo, work well
because I used it for my PhD research prototyping and is well suited for
my exploration of new domains (for example I'm now exploring the
Scuttlebutt protocol and social network [1] in Pharo). But I have not
being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo
instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language
they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis. I
have been more successful convincing philosophers, librarians,
journalists in using Pharo and they enjoy it, but I have not any Pharo
related local job proposal and I doubt I will have it.

[1] https://scuttlebutt.nz/

So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is
better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing
new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in
Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems.
Bridging both is pretty difficult. I will share some Blue Ocean
experiments, but still they are, as usual, weekend and holidays projects
without any promise or resources for a sustained rhythm or deliverables.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

Also, there is an important consequence of Richard's (and others)
outreach strategies and is the "inner-reach" echoes of them, so we have
this kind of talks that are worthy and not so frequent about the inter
subjectivities in our community and the ways we think and experience
about Smalltalk in the present and in the future.

Thank you all,

Offray

On 10/01/20 10:53 a. m., Marten Feldtmann wrote:
> Am 10.01.20 um 15:42 schrieb horrido:
>
>>> So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 
>>> 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front 
>>> of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an 
>>> application for today's markets.
>> I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and
>> millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent
> Well, naming it a "lie" is perhaps too strong - but Joachim (did you
> have a bad Smalltalk day ?) statement is from my point of view
> correct - this talking about function point and productivity is an
> academic point.
>
> If I am a Java developer and my productivity is around 10% compared to
> Smalltalk developer it is still useful to use Java - because for my
> problem there might exists already dozen of libraries and solutions.
>
> Using Smalltalk today is matter of personal taste and love - like many
> other developers in other languages.
>
> Joachim mentioned the critical points and for me perhaps the following
> statements are true:
>
> * Smalltalk development over the last decade ran in circles
>
> and due to that
>
> * Smalltalk is not solving the biggest problems any more
>
> So many time has been wasted to make a Smalltalk dialect running in a
> browser.
>
> I would use (my loved) Smalltalk today only, if
>
> * I have an application, which was written in Smalltalk (and I have one)
>
> * Smalltalk is superior to other solutions in a specific topic (and with
> Gemstone I have one topic)
>
> When I would start from scratch ... build a headless Smalltalk, put lots
> of good communication libraries into it, spread it over Windows, Mac and
> Linux, make it open source and put some XML and JSON and solve printing,
> multithreading/multiprocessing (framework) runtime AND (!) debugging,
> scripting, interconnections with other languages. Try adding a modelling
> and source code generator. Build the whole stuff with concurrency in
> mind - offer specific data structure to help you here. Look for suitable
> persistency options.
>
> Go back to the time, where Smalltalk source code was hold in a
> repository to manually work with it and and not getting software via
> Github with some broken relationships between packages and nobody kn

Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread horrido
itli...@schrievkrom.de wrote
> Am 10.01.20 um 15:42 schrieb horrido:
> 
>> 
>>> So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 
>>> 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front 
>>> of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an 
>>> application for today's markets.
>> 
>> I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects
>> and
>> millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including
>> recent
> 
> Well, naming it a "lie" is perhaps too strong - but Joachim (did you
> have a bad Smalltalk day ?) statement is from my point of view
> correct - this talking about function point and productivity is an
> academic point.

Not so academic. After all, the study was based on a huge number of software 
projects for dozens of programming languages over many years. It doesn't get 
any more practical than that.

The analysis was simplified by adopting the "function points" model which 
provides a level playing field for all the languages. It's about the amount
of
time needed to do a certain amount of work, whether that work is specific to
a few domains or to many. Some people may take issue with the analysis, but
it's there for your consideration at any rate.

Since there is no other study of its kind in the world, I choose to use it
in my
advocacy. Readers can make their own judgement.




--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Marten Feldtmann
Am 10.01.20 um 15:42 schrieb horrido:

> 
>> So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 
>> 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front 
>> of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an 
>> application for today's markets.
> 
> I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and
> millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent

Well, naming it a "lie" is perhaps too strong - but Joachim (did you
have a bad Smalltalk day ?) statement is from my point of view
correct - this talking about function point and productivity is an
academic point.

If I am a Java developer and my productivity is around 10% compared to
Smalltalk developer it is still useful to use Java - because for my
problem there might exists already dozen of libraries and solutions.

Using Smalltalk today is matter of personal taste and love - like many
other developers in other languages.

Joachim mentioned the critical points and for me perhaps the following
statements are true:

* Smalltalk development over the last decade ran in circles

and due to that

* Smalltalk is not solving the biggest problems any more

So many time has been wasted to make a Smalltalk dialect running in a
browser.

I would use (my loved) Smalltalk today only, if

* I have an application, which was written in Smalltalk (and I have one)

* Smalltalk is superior to other solutions in a specific topic (and with
Gemstone I have one topic)

When I would start from scratch ... build a headless Smalltalk, put lots
of good communication libraries into it, spread it over Windows, Mac and
Linux, make it open source and put some XML and JSON and solve printing,
multithreading/multiprocessing (framework) runtime AND (!) debugging,
scripting, interconnections with other languages. Try adding a modelling
and source code generator. Build the whole stuff with concurrency in
mind - offer specific data structure to help you here. Look for suitable
persistency options.

Go back to the time, where Smalltalk source code was hold in a
repository to manually work with it and and not getting software via
Github with some broken relationships between packages and nobody knows why.

Use the browser (with Javascript) as the main UI and build a superior
interface in Javascript to the backend Smalltalk. Use the Electron
framework and build some specific support for Smalltalk into that.

But even with that in mind you will not catch the Javascript developers
(because they are on that way already and they do not need Smalltalk),
but you may survive as a Smalltalk developer.

Spread the word around, that multi-language development is a MUST and
one should support it.

So, to summarize - this is my personal view of Smalltalk today - since
1986, where I first met Georg Heeg on a Atari fair in Düsseldorf seeing
the first Smalltalk system in my life.

Marten




-- 
Marten Feldtmann



[Pharo-users] TechTalks: Dates + Call

2020-01-10 Thread Marcus Denker
Hi,

Here are dates for the Pharo TechTalks first half of 2020:


January 23: https://association.pharo.org/event-3697009
Thursday 20 https://association.pharo.org/event-3697011
March 19 https://association.pharo.org/event-3697012
April 23 https://association.pharo.org/event-3697013
May 28 https://association.pharo.org/event-3697016
June 18 https://association.pharo.org/event-3697017

We need topics!

If you want to take over one of these talks to show your project (or something 
that you find interesting)
 —> send me a mail. 

The date/time can be changed as needed, too.


Archive of past techtalks: https://pharo.org/TechTalk


Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread David T. Lewis
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:52:51AM +0100, jtuc...@objektfabrik.de wrote:
> 
> I wanted to stay out of this thread, because it leads nowhere. But now 
> that I've typed all this, I will push the send button and regret it in a 
> few minutes...

Joachim,

Thanks for pushing the send button.

Dave




Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread horrido
jtuchel wrote
> Am 10.01.20 um 10:16 schrieb Marten Feldtmann:
>> That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was
>> IBM ...
> 
> Well, twice actually ;-)
> Many people might not know that HP once was a Smalltalk vendor with 
> their distributed Smalltalk (which was actually a white-label copy of 
> VisualWorks iirc/iiuc)...
> 
> Big corporations do not warrant the success of a technology. We'd still 
> be using OS/2, BS2000, whatever...  today if that was the case.

True, but major tech adoption *can* greatly increase public mindshare. 
C#, TypeScript, Golang, Kotlin, Swift, and Rust are good examples.


> So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 
> 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front 
> of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an 
> application for today's markets.

I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and
millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent
years with languages like C#, Ceylon, Dart, Elixir, F#, Golang, Haskell, 
Haxe, Julia, and LiveScript. Some of these are cutting-edge languages
used for modern applications.


> Smalltalk is great. If you don't need a mobile app to accompany your 
> product. It's great if your GUI doesn't have to be sexy as hell or you 
> are happy reinventing wheels. It is great if you only ship to PCs or on 
> the web and don't need a lot of interaction in the browser. Anything 
> else is hard in Smalltalk. If it's not, it is undocumented.

Well, perhaps not for ALL mobile apps, but Cordova is certainly used for
cross-platform mobile development. I've used it with Amber and PharoJS
and the documentation is pretty good.

People also use React Native, so there's no real reason to avoid JS.


> I am not sure if energy spent on these "syntax fits on a postcard and, 
> btw,  we have the balloon" articles could be better spent doing 
> something about the problems I mention here. I was in the same boat in 
> the late 90ies and early 2000's with my blog and articles and stuff. All 
> I found out was that nobody actually cares about these old hat stories. 
> Heck, a lot of people these days don't even care about maintainability. 
> You don't like it any more? No prob, we can redo it in this great new 
> (JS) framework anyways.

It's not an either-or situation. We can market Smalltalk *and* address the
technical weaknesses of Smalltalk. For example, I'm doing the former
and you guys are doing the latter. What's the problem?

It would be nice if more Smalltalkers got involved with Smalltalk marketing.
I can't do this forever.





--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Esteban Maringolo
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 6:53 AM jtuc...@objektfabrik.de
 wrote:

> I wanted to stay out of this thread, because it leads nowhere. But now
> that I've typed all this, I will push the send button and regret it in a
> few minutes...

Don't regret it, I like how you wrote and I agree with most of what
you said, maybe because we deal with similar kind of software
solutions.

It's only when you use something to solve a real problem, usually with
economic constraints, that you find its strengths and limitations. And
Smalltalk has both.

Regards,

Esteban A. Maringolo



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Kasper Østerbye
After having read this thread, I would like to add an other comment Richard.

It is really super that you are evangelising smalltalk and pharo. The
technology is truly worth it. And I should not try to take away your
enthusiasm.

Best,

Kasper


On 9 January 2020 at 17.07.25, Richard Kenneth Eng (
horrido.hobb...@gmail.com) wrote:

https://itnext.io/why-smalltalk-is-so-easy-to-evangelize-2b88b4d4605c


Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread horrido
The problem is that IBM and HP adopted Smalltalk at a time when Smalltalk
wasn't ready nor deserving. There was no major open source Smalltalk. There
were several commercial Smalltalk vendors sniping at each other. Smalltalk
was totally unprepared for the nascent web. Smalltalk was too heavy to run
on the hardware of the day. And C++ had a much stronger OOP narrative.

Today, we have many open source Smalltalks. The commercial vendors are more
civil. Smalltalk is most definitely web-ready. Smalltalk runs well on the
Raspberry Pi. And C++ is in decline, according to TIOBE.

Today, we need major tech adoption. Today's generation doesn't care about
who adopted what a quarter century ago. There's no reason IBM and HP
couldn't pick up the Smalltalk mantle again if they wanted to — the
Smalltalk landscape is totally different. The outlook for Smalltalk is a
brand new story.

Major tech companies are just as vulnerable to hype and marketing as human
beings are. They need to be persuaded to adopt Smalltalk. We can do our part
to help Amazon, Apple, HP, IBM, and others to see the light.



itli...@schrievkrom.de wrote
> That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was
> IBM ... and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market.
> Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach
> COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how
> to click programs together).
> 
> That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java
> ... so they never can go back.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Marten
> 
> Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido:
> 
>> 
>> It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk,
>> like
>> Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That
>> would
>> hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm
>> afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough. 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Marten Feldtmann





--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html



Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread jtuc...@objektfabrik.de

Am 10.01.20 um 10:16 schrieb Marten Feldtmann:

That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was
IBM ...


Well, twice actually ;-)
Many people might not know that HP once was a Smalltalk vendor with 
their distributed Smalltalk (which was actually a white-label copy of 
VisualWorks iirc/iiuc)...


Big corporations do not warrant the success of a technology. We'd still 
be using OS/2, BS2000, whatever...  today if that was the case.


The much bigger impact on Smalltalk's demise was that all vendors back 
in the nineties told their customers to switch somewehere else. One of 
them even never delivered what they had suggested as a replacement...



I tried not to jump in here, but I am still a bit surprised how many 
people state that Smalltalk was so superior to (whatever hyped thing of 
the day).


How many of us have built a nice iOS or Android App in Smalltalk? Do we 
even havy anything that might allow to do that in a power efficient way?
How many of us have built a modern-looking SPA web application in 
Smalltalk? Smalltalk-only?


These are areas where Smalltalk is quite weak and may not excel in any 
time soon. Let's be honest about it. None of the commercial vendors have 
announced anything in that direction, and to my knowledge, none of the 
open-source ones have anything more that the usual JS bridging.


Dart/Flutter promises to finally be a platform on which you can write 
apps for both mobile platforms, the web and maybe even native with one 
single code base. Does that sound like a dream to developers who need to 
pick a tool? I guess so.


Is there any point in telling people how great Smalltalk is when writing 
a mobile app or an SPA is hard to almost impossible?
I know there are prototypes and even shipped apps on mobile platforms. 
Some are available and can be used, but are complex and mostly 
undocumented. One is private and doesn't even have a (public) price tag 
(yet?).
Not really comparable to downloading Flutter and starting to write your 
first mobile app on a Saturday afternoon. Not sure the productivity 
advantage we keep praising (be it existent or not) will be noted much by 
somebody who needs to pick a tool now.


So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 
20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front 
of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an 
application for today's markets.


Smalltalk is great. If you don't need a mobile app to accompany your 
product. It's great if your GUI doesn't have to be sexy as hell or you 
are happy reinventing wheels. It is great if you only ship to PCs or on 
the web and don't need a lot of interaction in the browser. Anything 
else is hard in Smalltalk. If it's not, it is undocumented.


I am not sure if energy spent on these "syntax fits on a postcard and, 
btw,  we have the balloon" articles could be better spent doing 
something about the problems I mention here. I was in the same boat in 
the late 90ies and early 2000's with my blog and articles and stuff. All 
I found out was that nobody actually cares about these old hat stories. 
Heck, a lot of people these days don't even care about maintainability. 
You don't like it any more? No prob, we can redo it in this great new 
(JS) framework anyways.



I am not saying anything is wrong about the maintainability of Smalltalk 
code or greatness of our IDE support. I like it and use it every day. I 
love programming in Smalltalk and hunting bugs in Smalltalk and fixing 
customers' problems in Smalltalk. I can fix a bug while the user tells 
me about theit problem and I am convinced not many other technologies 
can support me in this as good as Smalltalk does. But, unfortunately, I 
spend way too much time reinventing GUI glue code fo the web. And, 
unfortunately, I need to implement a lot of stuff in Javascript. Oh, and 
unfortunately, there is nothing as good as this if I wanted to ship a 
nice mobile app to augment our service. When it comes to these, I am not 
productive. I am not even close to any bleeding edge, and if I want to 
be, I need to do it on my own. Is it more productive to reinvent a 
Smalltalk version of VueJS just do be able to do the same as VueJS in JS 
than it would be to learn JS and VueJS and do some part of my work in 
those?


I wanted to stay out of this thread, because it leads nowhere. But now 
that I've typed all this, I will push the send button and regret it in a 
few minutes...


Joachim






>and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market.

Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach
COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how
to click programs together).

That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java
... so they never can go back.




Marten

Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido:


It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, like
Ama

Re: [Pharo-users] Why Smalltalk is so easy to evangelize

2020-01-10 Thread Marten Feldtmann
That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was
IBM ... and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market.
Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach
COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how
to click programs together).

That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java
... so they never can go back.




Marten

Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido:

> 
> It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, like
> Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That would
> hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm
> afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough. 


-- 
Marten Feldtmann