Jose San Leandro wrote
If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how popular Smalltalk is.
Very useful, and not just a newbie opinion. On the Amber list, Richard Eng, who is working to make Smalltalk mainstream, was disappointed by his blog post stats. I responded in agreement with you [2]:
Unix, which Alan Kay describes as "a budget of bad ideas" (and I agree), took almost 50 years to take over the world [1]. Maybe you're 10 years too early to make Smalltalk popular ;) But seriously, I think you're using the wrong metrics. The great majority of people are instrumental thinkers i.e. they judge every new thing by how useful it is to their current goals. This is the definition of the Pink Plane. Given that the real value of Smalltalk is that it's prototype Dynabook software, which is way into the blue plane of computing, convincing the masses of its value is extremely unlikely - and not required! If say 10% of programmers are interested in the inherent value of ideas, and we capture this 10%, that will be more than enough critical mass. And given your report of relative popularity of your blog posts, 570/7000 = 8% doesn't sound too far off ;)
BTW I'm not saying don't try to reach as many people as possible, only to reframe what failure looks like.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/07/is-unix-now-the-most-succ...
[2] http://forum.world.st/A-Gentle-Introduction-to-Amber-tp4831244p4833048.html ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Bill-Gross-The-single-biggest-reason-why-startups-succ... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.