I guess I agree on the question being wrong.
There are quiet a few people I think did incredibly important things,
not only to Smalltalk. What about the people behind the Refactoring
Browser (John Brant? and I guess a few less prominent people who did
some of the groundwork), for example? Seaside has been mentioned
already, but there are other milestones, like TOPLink or Glorp (Alan
Knight and his ex-colleagues).
Then there are people who did a lot of ground work that tends to be
unseen. Niall Ross has been working in SUnit, RB, Rewriet Tool and Glorp
literally for decades without getting any laurels because he "only"
carried these milestones forward and kept them working. And there are
quite a few people who did amazing things that we tend to forget about.
The success of Smalltalk (and even if we are not mainstream, our
language has survived for 50 years and will not go anywhere soon, some
hyped technologies won't even make 10, not to think of 20 years) is
based on the work of so many people. What about Vanessa Freudenberg, The
whole Squeak and EToys community, OpenQwaq and scratch? OLPC? What about
the authors of the Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion? James
Robertson's Podcast was wonderful and I miss it a lot. But he had people
on the podcast who also made it a joyful experience: Willow Lucas-Smith
and David Buck come to mind. Anybody remember how much energy Randal
Schwartz once put into Smalltalk marketing?
I have only been in the Smalltalk world for the last 26 years, and
everybody I am mentioning here has been working on the foundation that
has been built for them a long time before that. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock?
Martin Fowler? Eric Clayberg? Joseph Pelrine are just a few names that
immediately com to my mind. And I am sure I am forgetting more important
names or even never heard of them.
We are standing on the shoulders of Giants. Some may even not be aware
of what they did. Partly because they have moved on to other languages
and communities. Likas Renggli, Julian Fitzell, Vassily Bykov, Michel
Bany, Martin Kobetic, many of the Eclipse guys. The list is just too long.
Joachim
Am 26.07.21 um 06:34 schrieb Richard Sargent:
Tudor Girba and his colleagues at feenk need to be recognized, too.
In many respects, they have pushed Smalltalk to do things that, I
think, the original designers would have heartily endorsed.
On Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 18:44 <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com
<mailto:horrido.hobb...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks to everyone for some great suggestions.
I’m coming around to the notion that I asked the wrong question.
In the context of Smalltalk’s 50th anniversary, the reason I asked
the question is because I noted that in APL’s 50th anniversary
celebration, they gave an award to the one individual who was
deemed the greatest contributor to APL. So I thought I might do
the same for Smalltalk.
But now, I’m seeing that was somewhat wrongheaded. Yes, it is the
community that made Smalltalk what it was, and what it is today.
Singling out one individual seems unfair, and rather arbitrary.
Maybe I’ll conduct a poll with these suggestions and let the
Smalltalk community express their support with their votes. That
may even provide some insight.
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