Dear community,
I am a silent follower of this list. Now, I feel urged to speak up not
on a technical, but a community matter.
Every village deserves it's fool. And a wise man does not feed the
troll (i did, and doing it right now, sorry). But if this fool is about
to take over a considerable amount of public control, the community has
to stand up against it. So, I put this to you:
I frequently research on Smalltalk-related topics (computer scientist,
try to devote time to open source dev next to my small enterprise). And
more and more, I notice that Google search results show very much on
top of the result list contributions by a self-appointed "Mr.
Smalltalk" aka R.K.Eng. who excels at SEO and flooding social media.
While self-initiatives are a thriving force for open communities, in
this case:
* one individual is hoging credit and applause, without ever having
commited a single line of code, putting himself into focus (without
having any profound knowledge; to the contrary: he shows a deep
ignorance towards "our" and other languages, throwing around dubious
advertisment slogans),
* ...is throwing around with wrong claims (pulling off any potentially
interested developer),
* ...is starting pointless flame wars against other programming
languages (again: detrimental to our community)
* ...is doing SEO to make Google show his own results before FOSS
community or sciences pages.
* ...is getting traction (and money) for his own ends (publicity for
the self-appointed "Mr. Smalltalk")
* ...denies community leadership by merit (Pharo core developers do
know, what they have created and where they want to go in the future,
and which audience we should target, they don't need a clueless person
telling them to "get into TIOBE index", just for example)
* is claiming credit for the work, others have done, fostering his own
publicity (not the interests of Pharo/VisualWorks etc).
Here is the Medium thread that made me write this mail to you all.
https://medium.com/@michael.z3d3r/who-is-this-self-appointed-mr-9ad9a18676eb
https://medium.com/@richardeng/even-people-who-understand-prototypal-inheritance-do-not-like-it-heres-an-inconvenient-truth-459330fe4e2e
the bottom line of our tedious flame war in a screenshot:
PS: a side note on Javascript (with lower S). wether you love or hate
this quirky lovechild of Lisp and Self/Smalltalk, telling JS developers
they are stupid and that they should abandon powerful Vue.js, for
example, in favor of Amber Smalltalk [cudos to Amber devs! great
thing!]) is utterly stupid! Every professional Javascript developer,
who is trying Smalltalk the first time, because he/she has read in a
post of "Mr. Smalltalk", that it is better, will instantly dismiss
Smalltalk and be disappointed. I love Smalltalk (certainly more than
JS), but it is detrimental, to throw around with these wrong claims
(which in the end are only a self-serving, ego-centric,
attention-greedy campaign to promote "Mr. Smalltalk" himself, a total
newbie, who claims credit for the work of others).
My suggestion: This community is open and inclusive. But we should
clarify, that if a single individual repeatedly goes against those, who
do the actual work, claims credits, insults people, then this person is
not fit to be part of this community. It sheds a very bad light onto
us. --> If R.K. Eng cannot respect community structure and decisions,
we should exclude him officially and publicly take distance from this
person.
Thank you for your attention.
Michael Zeder
