Thanks Jose, Sean and Steph,
I think that this is an important conversation, so here are my two
cents. It started small but suddenly it became long, so thanks in
advance for those who read it all. May be I'm giving the details Steph
asked for (may be to many details :-P).
For my Smalltalk is a better way to explore ideas via digital
prototypes. I have been using Linux since 1996 and have a glimpse of
Smalltalk in 2005 and despite of making my MSc thesis on Squeak / Bots
Inc as modeling and learning devices for collective problem solving[1]
and even being an active member of the Squeakland / Etoys community as
teacher and a speaker in community gatherings, the time for me at that
moment was too early: Me and my students were getting older but
Smalltalk didn't feel like growing with us. So I keep using Linux since
that time until now. My vehicle for writing, organizing and exploring
ideas via digital technologies were mainly TeXmacs[2], Leo[3],
IPython[4], Wikis (MoinMoin, tiddlywiki, dokuwiki), webframeworks
(web2py [4a]) and lately pandoc[5] and LaTeX.
What put Smalltalk in the radar again was the start of my Ph.D research
in 2010[6], at that moment as a important historical reference and an
intuition, but after finishing the "theoretical" part year and a half
ago (with some long pauses) I was finally able to put hands on the
technology again. It was the second half 2014.
I agree with Jose about Smalltalk as a different way to solve problems
and to empower people by let them think different. I have witness this
with myself. The problem I chose was "interactive documentation" and in
my approach documents are interactive trees which can arrange writing as
a "layered emergent dynamic process". I had this idea with Leo and
IPython[7][7a], but the file system approach was too complex: a lot of
different technologies, ways to think (data bases, procedural,
imperative, declarative, and object programming), frameworks and
technologies (qt, zeroMQ, javascript, JQuery, (I)Python, etc). With
Pharo I can explore the same idea in a uniform, comprehensive
interactive environment. This is still a pretty small ecosystem and
there are not so much mature libraries (SciSmalltalk is pretty small
compared to SciPython for example and web2py is easier to use that
Seaside or Aida), but I can, with a little help of the community, go
pretty far by myself with this idea of interactive tree-like
documentation. I would like to be better and to have more time and
continuity in this effort, instead of this activity rush + long pauses
rhythm, but even with my time and knowledge limitations I can be more
agile in testing ideas in this environment that in anything else I have
tested before.
It required Pharo, GT Tools, Roassal and Deep Into Pharo to feel the
environment empowering for me again and it took almost 10 years from my
first exposure to Smalltalk for learning and modeling in Squeak to
making my first "app" for interactive documentation in Pharo, again for
learning and modeling but for hackerspaces/citizens instead of
universities/students. 10 years to become again an active member of the
Smalltalk community (and member of the Pharo association [*]), despite
of being still a newbie and writing rookie code. I would like to
decrease for others this time between the first exposure to Smalltalk
and the continuous use of it as a vehicle for thinking different. That's
why I'm making workshops in our hackerspace and using data narratives
and visualization to teach young and adults about this other tools and
their ways of empowering thinking by writing/publishing differently.
So, if Unix took 50 years to take the world and, in my personal story,
Smalltalk took 10 years to empower my world, I would not be concerned
with quick popularity, but with fluid long lasting empowerment. I think
that we need to talk better with the "external" world (databases,
input/output formats and operative system libraries and process,
frameworks and communities) but for me the main value of Smalltalk is
the way it empowers individuals and communities by being a continuous,
interactive, coherent, extensible and comprehensible system to
explore/express ideas by yourself and that's something you can not get
easily in the Unix / file system world, because of its origins and its
development history[**].
Cheers,
Offray
[*] I can't find myself as a member, despite of paying my year
subscription. There is any way to trace what's happening?
[**] About the discussion pointed by Sean on Unix, I would recommend
"Unix haters handbook" [8] and Tracing the dynabook[9] for arguments
about the ideas of Unix versus the ideas of the Dynabook/Smalltalk.
Links
====
[1] http://mutabit.com/deltas/repos.fossil/offray-maestria-tesis/index
[2] http://texmacs.org/
[3] http://leoeditor.com/
[4] http://ipython.org/
[4a] http://web2py.com/
[5] http://pandoc.org/
[6] http://mutabit.com/deltas/repos.fossil/doctorado-offray/index
[7]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/on-deepness-and-complexity-of-ipython-documents.html
[7a]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/la-forma-en-que-escribo-para-el-doctorado.html
[8] http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
[9] http://tkbr.ccsp.sfu.ca/dynabook/
On 21/07/15 09:58, Sean P. DeNigris wrote:
Jose San Leandro wrote
If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how
popular Smalltalk is.
Very useful, and not just a newbie opinion. On the Amber list, Richard Eng,
who is working to make Smalltalk mainstream, was disappointed by his blog
post stats. I responded in agreement with you [2]:
Unix, which Alan Kay describes as "a budget of bad ideas" (and I
agree), took almost 50 years to take over the world [1]. Maybe you're 10
years too early to make Smalltalk popular ;) But seriously, I think you're
using the wrong metrics. The great majority of people are instrumental
thinkers i.e. they judge every new thing by how useful it is to their
current goals. This is the definition of the Pink Plane. Given that the
real value of Smalltalk is that it's prototype Dynabook software, which is
way into the blue plane of computing, convincing the masses of its value
is extremely unlikely - and not required! If say 10% of programmers are
interested in the inherent value of ideas, and we capture this 10%, that
will be more than enough critical mass. And given your report of relative
popularity of your blog posts, 570/7000 = 8% doesn't sound too far off ;)
BTW I'm not saying don't try to reach as many people as possible, only to
reframe what failure looks like.
[1]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/07/is-unix-now-the-most-successful-operating-system-of-all-time/
[2]
http://forum.world.st/A-Gentle-Introduction-to-Amber-tp4831244p4833048.html
-----
Cheers,
Sean
--
View this message in context:
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