If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how popular Smalltalk is.
I came to Smalltalk because a friend of mine (Rafa Luque) was enthusiastic about it, and suggested me to try it. The candy was not to build applications faster, but to think differently, to question what and how we approach problems with mainstream, industry "best practice" technologies and languages. I see Smalltalk more like what security researches think of their discipline: it's a process, not a list of tools or recipes. After almost two decades of developing commercial software for others and open-source projects (mainly) for myself, using mostly Java but also Lisp, Smalltalk has blown my mind. That wouldn't have happened if I'd tried Seaside just because I wanted to try a different web framework. In my case, to approach Smalltalk I needed a certain state of mind. You have to be aware programming is not memorizing design patterns and pay for an IDE to do most things for you, including to check for non-functional stuff nobody seems to care about. We're in the "i'm proud to be lazy" era. I've seen smart people reject Smalltalk just because they don't seem to care about what they do, or at least they don't want to invest their time and energy. Probably there's a way to convert Pharo in node.js or Go, to make people use Seaside instead of ruby on rails. More people potentially means more financial support, and a better, sooner, full-featured, Pharo. But even then, Smalltalk empowers people to think differently and gives the means to do so, and to promote that has to tackled differently. I'd focus on how using Smalltalk gradually makes you a better professional, before blaming ourselves for not yet providing sophisticated frameworks anyone can use even if they don't know what they're doing. Let's take the Scala or the Git case. What made people invest in learning them was, at least in part, that they felt smarter. We should focus on that: comparing how the same problem is solved in other languages. Showing what live programming is. Don't be humble just to be polite. On the other hand, Smalltalk enables us to face problems that are potentially unachievable in other languages / ecosystems. Let's define on a "Pharo way to do X", which inevitably starts building a domain-specific browser, a custom IDE, and recipes for common scenarios. In summary, as Martin Bahr says, it's critically important to ensure we can survive indefinitely until the perfect "timing" arrives. But don't punish ourselves too much for not being popular. For me, the greatest value lies elsewhere. 2015-07-21 3:14 GMT+02:00 Sean P. DeNigris <s...@clipperadams.com>: > Martin Bähr wrote > > did smalltalk miss its chance, so we should give up? > > or is it still coming? glass bowl anyone? > > Using Unix - which took 50 years to takeover the world - as a metric, we > should be hitting our stride in about 2030 ;) > > > > ----- > Cheers, > Sean > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/Bill-Gross-The-single-biggest-reason-why-startups-succeed-tp4838376p4838456.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > >
