great topic

Time to upvote outside our niche?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7225808

On Feb 12, 2014, at 3:06 PM, btc@openinworld.com wrote:

hi kilon,��

Thanks for your words.�� I particularly like them since you've come recently to Smalltalk after a number of other languages.

There is some interesting discussion of this topic at [1] which indicate a predominance of non-technical issues and technical issues that don't apply today.
Paul Grahams "Blub Paradox" [2] explains why popular is not always best.
Finally, I'd like to get an update on this from this Gartner [3]..

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsSmalltalkDead
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html���� (for the time constrained search down the page for "Blub")
[3] http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_driver/2008/10/09/remember-smalltalk/

cheers -ben

kilon alios wrote:

frankly I find the community here, extremely friendly , well motivated, reasonable and humble. And I dont let a couple of incidents per year change my mind of what happens here on a daily basis.��

Smalltalk is unpopular because it never had a big company behind it or a good marketing strategy. 99% of people out there, had, have and will have no clue what smalltalk is all about.��

You want to talk about ObjC ? fine . Lets be honest , objc was like 42th most popular language in TIOBE and now is like 3rd. Why ? because iOS. Thats all, not because of quality of the language , not because it has super friendly community , not because users saw the light.��

��The only thing that ObjC shares with smalltalk is message passing. Does that make ObjC part of the family , eh , no. Unless you are prepared to let tons other languages and IDEs join you, but then you still wont have a family but a nation. And ObjC is a seriously ugly language. Its still no C++ , Javascript , Perl or PHP, but its ugly. Smalltalk is gorgeous.��

Also dont put too much emphasis on popularity. Java library is super popular and many of its libraries are a big pile of mess. Its quantity vs quality. C++ is on the same boat. Popularity gives you mainly quantity.��

����

My advice is don't be humble, be proud of your work and what you have accomplished with Pharo and your individual project. And if sometimes things go south , remember its much better to be passionate than being dull. Its all part of being human. Keep an open mind, and keep walking , one step at a time.

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

On 12 Feb 2014, at 14:54, askoh <askoh@askoh.com> wrote:

> The recent arguments in Smalltalk made me have an Eureka moment on why
> Smalltalk is not popular. Smalltalk attracts brilliant people. But these
> brilliant people scare others away. Instead of Showing How, they Show Off.
> Instead of being inclusive, they are picky. Instead of discussing, they
> fight.
>
> So, Smalltalkers, please be humble, friendly and pacific. Show How. Invite
> anyone interested to join. And let's talk normally.

I agree, of course. (With the second paragraph, less with the first: these discussion happen everywhere, ever read emails by Linus Torvalds ?)

--

But I had an epiphany today, based on this discussion of what is the definition of Smalltalk. I hereby declare that we are the _third_ most popular language (family) in use today !

Based on this very reputable (ahem) index:

�� http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I really think that in a broad definition of Smalltalk, Objective-C is part of the family.

According to the first line of

�� http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.

And messaging is at the core of Smalltalk. It also has a similar class based object model, is late bound in almost everything and has some reflective capabilities. There are even a couple of projects mixing the two explicitly.

Reserve a bigger venue for the next ESUG !

Sven

PS: We've had these discussions before on various occasions: it is really hard to come up with a definition of what is Smalltalk, or even a good list of what is so special about it - there really is a elusive, hard to define aspect to it.

> All the best,
> Aik-Siong Koh
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Why-Smalltalk-is-not-popular-tp4743009.html
> Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>