Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Btw, I think we gained pace when JS took over the front end, but lost visibility. Nothing is slower than coding a client/server app with the front end in JS. The ‘rise’ of JS is a side effect of the fact that the web was designed, built and continues to be built by ‘coders’ who don’t know enough to be called amateurs. What puts 'coders’ off though is related to way JS is and (mostly doesn’t) work. You can’t just sit down and ‘hack on’ Smalltalk until it ‘sorta kinda’ does what you want. You can’t grab code from some random website and ‘fiddle with it’ until it ‘sorta kinda’ works. ‘Coders’ can’t make it ‘sorta kinda’ work, and they don’t know how to write code that works. One of the better JS programmers I’ve worked with said at one point “Engineers can’t write JavaScript because it doesn’t fit their mentality. I used to be a retoucher, I’d spend hours and hours getting one pixel right. There’s no good reason that one pixel had to be that way, but the image didn’t ‘go’ otherwise. JavaScript is like that, you spend hours and hours messing with it, getting it to work, and at the end you don’t know why it works, nor why it didn’t. That’s not an engineer’s mindset.” Do aviation engineers choose tools based on ‘popularity’? At the same time, would you want your next flight to be on an aircraft running on JavaScript? I wouldn’t eat from a microwave running JavaScript. I’d rather be an engineer than a popularity contestant or a fashion victim. In any case, more often than not it’s management that chooses technologies, generally based on who they have lunch with more than anything else. Andrew Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Dimitris Chloupis Sent: Monday, November 6, 2017 2:35 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Another way of promoting Pharo is copying its advantages to other languages. The ideal way is for people to get straight to Pharo and fall in love with it. But sometimes this may be possible for several reasons. The most usual being that people simple are not in the mood of learning a new language unless they have to. As the saying goes "People love progress , its just that they equally hate change" Introducing similar features to another language, like I did with introducing live coding enviroment to Python with direct reference back to Pharo is a very good way to promote the language. Just because you cannot code in Pharo at your work does not mean you cannot code the Pharo way. Just put a huge tag in your documentation, comments and anywhere you mention your code "inspired by Pharo ( https://pharo.org)" and you will get their attention whether they like the idea of learning a new language or not.  Its like watching an ad, using sex, humour and even unrelated stuff to grab your attention to a product. The idea here is to get the attention, once you do that, the rest follows.  A huge problem with Smalltalk in general is that even though every language, enviroment, tool, IDE has been copying it , it is rarely mentioned. If it did , I have no doubt it would have been masively more popular than it is right now.  On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 9:22 AM jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> wrote: Phil, Am 26.10.17 um 08:17 schrieb phil@highoctane.be:

Now we miss the boat on mobile and bigdata, but this is solvable.

You know, "It's solvable, and it's even easy in Smalltalk" has been what we've been shouting down at those worms in the C++/Java swamp for decades. We just never really proved it. We also missed the boat on web. Seaside was the last real innovation in that field, almost 15 years ago. When Javascript took over the frontend, we lost pace.

If we had an open Java bridge (and some people in the community have it for Pharo but do not open source it - so this is eminently doable) + Pharo as an embeddable piece (e.g. like Tcl and Lua) and not a big executable we would have a way to embed Pharo in a lot of places (e.g. in the Hadoop ecosystem where fast starting VMs and small footprint would make the cluster capacity x2 or x3 vs uberjars all over the place)  this would be a real disruption.

To it sounds like a big ball of mud to me, but that is opinion ;-)

Think about being able to call Pharo from JNA https://github.com/java-native-access/jna the same way we use C with UFFI.

Smalltalk argument for me is that it makes development bearable (even fun and enjoyable would I say) vs the other stacks. That matters.

Yep. As long as there is no mobile, web or big data involved ;-) To me that is not enough for convincing project managers these days, because web, mobile and big data as well ass AI (oh, is that probably no. 4 on our list of missed boats?) are the topics of what we consider future-proof projects... I am not only dissing the Pharo community here, this is a problem for all Smalltalk vendors in my opinion. Joachim -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1