Re: [Pharo-users] New Pharo article at The Cohort

Agreed. This obsession with popularity in North America is kind of sad when is looked from elsewhere and is really pervasive: from teenagers comedies to technologies and business. Any community needs "proper size" to keep momentum and agility. Too big, it become bureaucratic or stagnant. Too little, it become fragile and non supportive. Cheers, Offray On 20/11/17 11:20, Andrew Glynn wrote:

The amount of FUD spread by M$ and IBM, just two very noticeable examples out of numerous others, is possible because very few of those laws are applicable unless the statement is part of a paid campaign by the originating company.  If I exaggerate how well my MB 400E was made on a blog post, neither I nor MB are likely to run into any legal issues.  If MB does so in an advertisement, it becomes a different matter.

 

That said, I don’t think merit is really in question.  There are two bigger ones: 

 

1. To whose advantage is inefficient development and the tooling that promotes it?

 

2. How would people who find it too /difficult/ to maintain state in a single threaded language acclimatize themselves to Pharo Smalltalk (or to any actual programming language, for that matter) ?

 

The first question doesn’t have one answer, since it’s to the advantage of a number of interested parties, from large organizations that can afford inefficiency more than smaller competitors (and simultaneously can afford the not inconsequential investment in writing a proprietary Smalltalk or something similar for things that “must work”), to click-bait online ‘forums’ such as “Slack Overload”. 

 

The second, well, I suppose how you would answer it depends on your experience working with said people.  My own hasn’t been particularly positive.

 

Not that I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of Pharo becoming mainstream.  It would then be subject to the same disruption as current mainstream environments.  The degradation of Java environments over the past 20 years is a good example.  It was never great, but the combination of syntactic parmesan to hide the bad spaghetti and the need to support every passing fad has made it nearly unusable. I’ve seen a number of companies specifying Java 7 or even Java 6 in their tech stacks “because Java 8 is too unreliable”.

 

Until mainstream “software engineers” start /acting/ like engineers, i.e. people who make things /work/, rather than popularity contestants or fashion victims, that won’t change.

 

Andrew Glynn

 

*From: *Richard A. O'Keefe <mailto:ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> *Sent: *Sunday, November 19, 2017 6:19 PM *To: *Pharo-users@lists.pharo.org <mailto:Pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> *Subject: *Re: [Pharo-users] New Pharo article at The Cohort

 

I'm obviously missing a lot of the context here, but in  my

country (New Zealand) there is something called the

Fair Trading Act.

 

My understanding from reading the Commerce Commission web

site is that

  - false or misleading representations about goods or

    services or the availability of goods are against the

    law

  - "The penalties for breaching the Act can be severe"

    (Grant Harris).

  - obviously wild exaggerations made to be funny are sort

    of OK, but if anyone falls for them you could find this

    tested in court

  - "Any claims made to bolster the image of a business or

    its products or services must be accurate."

  - "The Act applies even when there was no intention to

    breach the Act".  (Grant Harris again.)

 

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/fair-trading/fair-trading-act-fact-sheets/claiming...

 

The Fair Trading Act was passed as part of a program of market

liberalisation and in order to foster competition and market

efficiency, and the majority of the cases have been trader-to-

trader.  Why mention this?  Because it's not just places where

consumer protection is high-ranked that have such laws; it's

also places that are gung-ho about free markets and competition

and want to protect businesses.

 

Law in the USA varies from state to state.  For California, see

https://www.truthinadvertising.org/california/

(which has a navbar on the right for other states).

 

Me, I think Pharo is good enough to "sell" on its merits

without any exaggerations.  (If you could combine the great

looks of Dolphin Smalltalk with the great features of Pharo,

drool...)