The problem is that IBM and HP adopted Smalltalk at a time when Smalltalk wasn't ready nor deserving. There was no major open source Smalltalk. There were several commercial Smalltalk vendors sniping at each other. Smalltalk was totally unprepared for the nascent web. Smalltalk was too heavy to run on the hardware of the day. And C++ had a much stronger OOP narrative.
Today, we have many open source Smalltalks. The commercial vendors are more civil. Smalltalk is most definitely web-ready. Smalltalk runs well on the Raspberry Pi. And C++ is in decline, according to TIOBE. Today, we need major tech adoption. Today's generation doesn't care about who adopted what a quarter century ago. There's no reason IBM and HP couldn't pick up the Smalltalk mantle again if they wanted to — the Smalltalk landscape is totally different. The outlook for Smalltalk is a brand new story. Major tech companies are just as vulnerable to hype and marketing as human beings are. They need to be persuaded to adopt Smalltalk. We can do our part to help Amazon, Apple, HP, IBM, and others to see the light. itli...@schrievkrom.de wrote > That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was > IBM ... and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market. > Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach > COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how > to click programs together). > > That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java > ... so they never can go back. > > > > > Marten > > Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido: > >> >> It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, >> like >> Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That >> would >> hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm >> afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough. > > > -- > Marten Feldtmann -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
