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:��

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

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
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 6:19 PM
To: 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-you-re-something-you-re-not/

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...)