The amount of FUD spread by M$ and IBM, just two very noticeable examples out
of numerous others, is possible because very few of those laws are applicable
unless the statement is part of a paid campaign by the originating company. If
I exaggerate how well my MB 400E was made on a blog post, neither I nor MB are
likely to run into any legal issues. If MB does so in an advertisement, it
becomes a different matter.
That said, I don’t think merit is really in question. There are two bigger
ones:
1. To whose advantage is inefficient development and the tooling that promotes
it?
2. How would people who find it too difficult to maintain state in a single
threaded language acclimatize themselves to Pharo Smalltalk (or to any actual
programming language, for that matter) ?
The first question doesn’t have one answer, since it’s to the advantage of a
number of interested parties, from large organizations that can afford
inefficiency more than smaller competitors (and simultaneously can afford the
not inconsequential investment in writing a proprietary Smalltalk or something
similar for things that “must work”), to click-bait online ‘forums’ such as
“Slack Overload”.
The second, well, I suppose how you would answer it depends on your experience
working with said people. My own hasn’t been particularly positive.
Not that I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of Pharo becoming mainstream.
It would then be subject to the same disruption as current mainstream
environments. The degradation of Java environments over the past 20 years is a
good example. It was never great, but the combination of syntactic parmesan to
hide the bad spaghetti and the need to support every passing fad has made it
nearly unusable. I’ve seen a number of companies specifying Java 7 or even Java
6 in their tech stacks “because Java 8 is too unreliable”.
Until mainstream “software engineers” start acting like engineers, i.e. people
who make things work, rather than popularity contestants or fashion victims,
that won’t change.
Andrew Glynn
From: Richard A. O'Keefe
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 6:19 PM
To: Pharo-users@lists.pharo.org
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] New Pharo article at The Cohort
I'm obviously missing a lot of the context here, but in my
country (New Zealand) there is something called the
Fair Trading Act.
My understanding from reading the Commerce Commission web
site is that
- false or misleading representations about goods or
services or the availability of goods are against the
law
- "The penalties for breaching the Act can be severe"
(Grant Harris).
- obviously wild exaggerations made to be funny are sort
of OK, but if anyone falls for them you could find this
tested in court
- "Any claims made to bolster the image of a business or
its products or services must be accurate."
- "The Act applies even when there was no intention to
breach the Act". (Grant Harris again.)
http://www.comcom.govt.nz/fair-trading/fair-trading-act-fact-sheets/claiming-you-re-something-you-re-not/
The Fair Trading Act was passed as part of a program of market
liberalisation and in order to foster competition and market
efficiency, and the majority of the cases have been trader-to-
trader. Why mention this? Because it's not just places where
consumer protection is high-ranked that have such laws; it's
also places that are gung-ho about free markets and competition
and want to protect businesses.
Law in the USA varies from state to state. For California, see
https://www.truthinadvertising.org/california/
(which has a navbar on the right for other states).
Me, I think Pharo is good enough to "sell" on its merits
without any exaggerations. (If you could combine the great
looks of Dolphin Smalltalk with the great features of Pharo,
drool...)
