2015-10-14 12:24 GMT-03:00 Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com>:
Just a passing thought... When comparing the popularity of programming languages, maybe technological features are less important than sponsorship by a large tech corporation. http://insights.dice.com/2015/10/13/apples-swift-is-killing-objective-c/
Interesting. I think it is not corporate sponsorship (as it was with Java or .Net a decade ago) but it is where it is going to run the software that you write. So it's not killing it, just displacing it. Swift is popular because if you want to write modern iOS apps you don't want to learn a language that is obsolete for the platform (it is, Objective-C). The same goes for Java in Android. JavaScript got popular not because of Mozilla or ECMA promoting it, but because it can run on almost any device today. And it is displacing popular "solutions" like Rails and alike, because it is becoming the language to run single-page-apps (Meteor/Ember/Angular, etc.) and to many server side solutions like Node that runs on embedded devices as well. So I don't think it is the promotion of it putting money into marketing but instead the interest of the software developer or company to write software that can be used in many devices as possible. Mobile software (iOS/Android) has taken the end user market share, followed by web apps. Native desktop apps are a niche these days, it's not going to disappear, but it will continue to shrink as the other platforms continue to add features.
Anyhow I don't mind that the masses haven't discovered Pharo. I enjoy it.
I don't think that secrecy is something to be proud of, I also enjoy Pharo, but abundance of libraries and frameworks makes you more productive, and to have that you need a bigger community. Whether Pharo is ready to receive a HUGE adoption today, both as software, ecosystem (scm, module distribution, services, etc.) and also social community is a different story. Regards! Esteban A. Maringolo