On 9 March 2012 18:49, Camillo Bruni <camillobruni@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2012-03-09, at 17:11, Torsten Bergmann wrote:
Hi Stefan,
I'm not sure if it is a killer app that is required to get more visibility for Pharo or a better adoption of Smalltalk.
We already have nice open-source apps ranging from Seaside, Pier, Moose, Swiki, ... up to other Smalltalk apps that are sucessfull also in business life.
Look at JPMorgans Kapital project done in VW, other big Smalltalk projects or the Pharo success stories [2] meanwhile known to the world. Still Smalltalk is very unknown among developers ...
we need visibility... the image as a sole source does not help here, most programmers like files and scripts and their common editors :)
every time i hear sentences about "my favorite editor" i thinking about creating a new text editor project and with a name "WriteOwn". WriteOwn text editor.
- use common tools (github for instance will be available soon on Pharo) - get indexable documentation (google doesn't seem to like squeaksource that much) :) - we need better system integration (accessing ENV vars and program args is still a bit messy in Pharo) - we need an embeddable VM (I guess that is also on the way :))
I agree with Dave Thomas who said that the object abstraction is too complex for the majority of programmers. [1] Most people are happy with (boring) CRUD applications and I doubt a killer app implemented in Smalltalk will change this. Most of them see no need for switching from Java, C#, ...
look at ruby with ruby on rails, people seem to like it despite the heavy meta programming used in it
=> we need a decent scripting api (almost there with coral)
Not that I would not want to see Trac/Bugzilla/... one-click replacements done in Smalltalk - but building them will eat up our resources to build something that should be even better than current Smalltalks.
that might be true, but looking at pharo I seem we still lack some basic tools of a modern programming language. However we made a massive progress over the last years ;)
I doubt that Pharo will become the "next big thing". I'm not sad about that since most hype technologies will easily fade away when the next hype comes up.
Maybe you remember auctomatic.com - these guys have built an app with Seaside and sold the company for lots of money. So it must have been a killer app.
One of them (Patrick) shares some nice thoughts on his page [3] - if you replace "auctomatic" with Pharo and "ebay" with one of the mainstream technologies like Java it is an interesting guide for a future of Pharo too. Especially regarding internationalization which is I think an interesting area to get more people into Smalltalk.
Bye Torsten
[1] http://smalltalk-bob.blogspot.com/2012/03/who-needs-objects.html [2] http://www.pharo-project.org/about/success-stories [3] http://patrickcollison.com/blog/2009/10/surprises
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