Thanks a lot Paulo for starting this thread and all the participants for the clever and enlightening answers.
I just want to add my two cents. On 26/10/17 07:53, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > My personal opinion is that as pessimistic it may sound, Smalltalk has > very little to offer in the library front. The language is still > stellar and live environment is a great concept but from there on > there is a decline. Sure if your are low demand kind of person on the > library front and dont mind implementing stuff by yourself you wont > mind the lack of libraries but most coders , me included , dont have > this luxury. Especially making a living with a language is a > completely different story from learning it as a hobby, > > I think and that's a personal opinion, that Smalltalk goes the wrong > direction. It tries to be a do it all language, but we already have an > army of do it all languages. I think it would excel as the backbone in > big complex projects. Like the Moose project is doing with code > analysis and visualization. I think this is an excellent direction to > go with Smalltalk. Reflection is the big strength of Smalltalk the > ability to communicate with its code in a direct matter. So I think > that a Smalltalk implementation that can analyze and visualize code > written in other languages would have been a pretty serious reason for > people to learn Smalltalk. > > I am very happy to see Pharo go towards that direction and yes I would > definitely recommend it without hesitation for code analysis and > project management tool. Its no coincidence that we have seen a > serious growth in our community. When I joined back in 2011 we all > were posting at pharo-dev, pharo-users was a dead zone and then the > community grow larger and larger we soon may need a third mailing list. > > Code complexity is an issues for all large projects and tools that > help manage this without having to convert to another language are > very popular. About finding niche where you can learn Pharo and make a living from it, I think that I may be behind a sweet spot in the field of reproducible research and data storytelling and visualization, for different fields like activism, journalism, science and engineering. I'm "working in my PhD", so I don't get paid for using Pharo & friends (well if fact I'm in a loan to finish my PhD), but using Pharo have allowed my to get more dynamic results that with previous technologies (mostly Python and Web ones). By being able to prototype quickly I have improved my research experience and results, which is a way to improve research (self) funding. Also, activists, journalist, researchers and other novices interested in data storytelling and visualization, care little about popularity of the language or being able to make apps (mobile or web). What they care is about being able to tell the story and Pharo, agile visualization and moldable tools, have a lot to offer in this front. They're easy to learn and to adapt to fit the needs of the problems behind those stories, as we have done with Grafoscopio[1]. So, is nice to be part of a "trend", (data science, reproducible research, data storytelling and data visualization) but not being part of one that doesn't give you the freedom to use tools that matter to you, because of the ideas they embody and the added value they create for you and your community. [1] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html Also, being in Latin America, means that we can bootstrap ourselves into alternative futures by using alternative (digital) infrastructures and tools, without to much worry about the deep investments in money and/or expertise on bloated/popular technologies (we don't have such investments here!). We can learn from the experience of the "Global North", without following that path, but by taking a critical approach to it (for example regarding overcomplex, non-dynamic, bloated technologies). On the community front, I think is important to do something to break the circular logic of popularity: Smalltalk is unpopular, so we don't get developers, so we don't have libraries, and this makes such tech unpopular. We're a nascent community of data storytellers and activists learning how to use Pharo to tell our voices and how to modify the tools to tell them in more potent/fluid ways. We have done this mostly by ourselves, without any support from industry or government and mostly none from academy. Despite of the fragility of our hackerspace[2], this has been done in a consistent way since almost two years[3] (I started to learn Pharo, in a sparse way, 3 years ago). So, there are ways to break the circular logic and bootstrap communities around the advantages of the Pharo/Smalltalk environment in places where it can be aligned to the trends but also take a critical approach to them by providing added value. [2] http://hackbo.co/ [3] http://mutabit.com/dataweek/ So finding a niche and bootstrapping tools and communities in it, seems a way to deploy the Smalltalk Argument by example into the world, which is a pretty powerful way to argument against skeptics. Cheers, Offray
