Dear Ben, Jimmie, Stephane, Tim, Dimitris, Marten, Davorin, Stephan, Sebastian and James,

thank you for your feedback! Your excellent replies will sure help me with
my "Smalltalk Argument". Obviously the language cannot be employed to
efficiently implement solutions for problems in all domains, but it cannot
simply be ruled out just because it is not so visible as other languages
clamoring for the spotlight, as Jimmie pointed out.

So far I got good results that can talk for themselves thanks to Pharo/Smalltalk.
So the problem here, I believe, is really Smalltalk not being the "cool kid in town",
which leads to a misperception of the language by the non-versed. This can be
certainly be blamed to the lack of a good business oriented OSS Smalltalk years ago,
as Ben guessed, but certainly there are other factors, which are not the scope
of this discussion.

The fact that a good OO-software developer can learn and start to get productive
in Smalltalk in a relatively short amount of time, as pointed out by several of you,
will make a good argument against the concerns of my colleagues here, which
are mainly non-software developers. And surely the willingness to learn a new
language is a sign to be looked at in a candidate, as pointed by you too.

The second most loved language by 67% of developers surveyed cannot simply
be ruled out because of unfounded concerns. (Thanks again for the information,
Jimmie). I think there is really a great potential here, and surely there is a greater
pool of developer candidates to "draw from" than one can initially imagine/see.

Cheers,

Paulo

On 10/20/2017 12:17 AM, Ben Coman wrote:


On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Paulo R. Dellani <dellani@pobox.com> wrote:
Dear all,

after using Smalltalk for several years I developed a passion for the
language (how not to?), and Pharo is just so great to develop with.
So thank you guys for keeping this wonderful project running.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to always point out why Smalltalk
should be employed as "main development language" in a team
or for a project. In the last discussion of this sort I was confronted
with the question "where are we going to get new smalltalk
developers if our startup grows or if you go?". Well, I had no
good answer to that. What would have you answered?

Cheers,

Paulo



When Smalltalk comes up on reddit, news.ycombinator, etc,
I often see comments "Used Smalltalk 10 years ago, loved it, but not in my day job for years ..."
The guess the lack of a good business oriented OSS Smalltalk years ago may be to blame.
Only supposition, but with the long history of Smalltalker, the pool to draw from may be greater than first apparent.
The main problem may be that these people are not searching for Smalltalk jobs due to the perceived availability of jobs.


There would obviously be some lag, but for longer term planning, talk to your local education providers about introducing Smalltalk as the "best" environment for teaching OO,
and then take the talented students from there.�� Consider contacting the academic partners here...
http://consortium.pharo.org/


Another approach depending on the project structure might be to "just" prototype in Smalltalk (because its highly productive to explore a domain with its��built in data persistence)
and per Fred Brooks plan to throw it away to cleanly implement in a mainstream language once you "know" what needs to be done.����
I remember seeing one case reported here that the prototype worked so well that the client didn't bother with the second step.


cheers -ben