On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas < offray@riseup.net> wrote:
HI all,
I was making a talk here in Colombia trying to invite people to conform a Smalltalk study group. I was showing them Pier and Seaside as "selling points" for making a project and there is some initial interest. The typical questions about:
* If Smalltalk is so good, why is not widely known ?
Half serious / half jookes - Marketing - It was expensive -> none (or few?) open-source dialect existed when Java arrived. - Something that is easy and simple is difficult to sell. Companies are stupid. They buy complexity. - Because doing Smalltalk is a letal weapon for a company. Imagine you have a super secret tool that makes a big difference with your competirors, would you tell it to your competiros? - Smalltalkers used to be quite close people and nobody likes to document -> Smalltalk has few documentation in comparison to other languages. - Smalltalk is too different from all the rest of the languages. - Companies are afraid of using Smalltalk because nobody use it -> endess loop. - Because few universities teach Smalltalk now. - Because it is difficult to find Smalltalkers, hence companies don't want to buy a proyect where they cannot find people to maintain it after. * Which famous/big project is made with Smalltalk ?
- JP Morgan - Telecom - AMD - Banks - Medical stuff - Military http://www.goodstart.com/who-uses-smalltalk.ssp http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Smaltalk/Companies
where in place. I think that Pier, Seaside, Etoys, Scratch, DrGeo, Croquet,
- Moose, Magma, Gemstone
are really good projects to motivate people towards learning Smmalltalk, but they're kind of "niche" projects (I have no problem with that), but searching for information about who to solve these questions I found this talk on ESUG 2009:
http://www.esug.org/**Conferences/2009/Current+List+** of+Talks/Smalltalk%27s+Image+**Problem<http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2009/Current+List+of+Talks/Smalltalk%27s+Ima...>
So I wonder if anyone has the memories/slides of this talk and, of course, what community thinks about these questions.
Thanks,
Offray
-- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com