Hi Jose, Thank you for your well written feedback. It is very important to hear a voice like yours. It is hard to articulate why we like Pharo/Smalltalk. Like you say, it has to do because it is so different, because we learn from it, because it empowers us, because we feel it is a good way to develop software.
Sven PS: I didn't really like the talk either, doing something new, trailblazing is always hard, often fails and sometimes works, afterwards is always seems like 'it was the right time'. > On 21 Jul 2015, at 12:08, Jose San Leandro <jose.sanlean...@osoco.es> wrote: > > 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. > >
