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.
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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