It depends on how one interprets the last paragraph. Yours is one interpretation, and one that never occurred to me. I didn't see it as "demoting" other languages. The paragraph in no way criticizes other languages. It simply suggests that Smalltalk offers many more resources for evangelism. It's all relative. I happen to like Dart, Elixir, Golang, Julia, and Rust. But be honest: do these languages provide nearly as many reasons to choose them? I'm not being deprecatory. Esteban A. Maringolo wrote

Hi Richard,

Regardless of the reasoning behind the title of the article, I don't like the tone of the last paragraph, it is not necessary, and probably not recommended either, to demote other languages in order to promote yours. In particular languages that have their own merits and capabilities to which Smalltalk/Pharo can't fulfill today, and by design won't neither.

Regards,

Esteban A. Maringolo

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 1:07 PM Richard Kenneth Eng <

horrido.hobbies@

> wrote:

...

https://itnext.io/why-smalltalk-is-so-easy-to-evangelize-2b88b4d4605c

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

This rant states once again that in Smalltalk everything is an object. Alas, it is not (but should). This is a shortlist of things which is currently not objects in smalltalk: * Message categories * Class categories (there is something called packages, which is rather useful as they are actually objects, but they are not really done nicely - manifest and RPackage???) * The virtual machine (there is only one singleton thingie) * The screen (there is only one why can one not instantiate more than one world - I guess it is somewhat possible when we get gtk). * Projects as (as in collection of objects). I happened to learn Simula before Smalltalk (I am Scandinavian after all). When I program in Smalltalk I for sure miss nested classes and other block-structured things. I happened to learn Beta (successor to Simula) before Smalltalk. I miss being able to define virtual classes - but it is moot as there is no block structure. To me, what really is nice about Smalltalk is NOT the language - it is the image and live programming. And I can get around all the problems with the language because of it. I miss: * Nested name spaces - when we finally get around to it, please do not do just one level. * Singular objects with behaviour I can write in a few lines (a single object overriding one or a few methods) * A simple switch/case statement * … But despite all this, I find programming in smalltalk much more fulfilling than any other thing I ever touched. Best, Kasper

Kasper Osterbye wrote

in Smalltalk everything is [not] an object ... * Message categories

I agree with the thrust of your post and would like many of the items you suggest. That said, one semantic nitpick: "everything is an object" means as opposed to primitive types i.e. Date is an object that receives messages like any other, unlike in a language where it's a primitive type with hidden restrictions on how to interact with it. What you seem to be saying is that our objects are not always appropriate/optimal reflections of the domain, which is true but different. ----- Cheers, Sean -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Absolutely correct. Each of those languages do have good reasons to choose them. I have never said otherwise. My point is that Smalltalk gives me many more reasons, many more ways to evangelize it. Smalltalk is very easy to evangelize. That's the premise of the entire article, and if it's wrong, then I should delete the entire article. Is it wrong? Esteban A. Maringolo wrote

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 2:23 PM horrido <

horrido.hobbies@

> wrote:

...

I happen to like Dart, Elixir, Golang, Julia, and Rust. But be honest: do these languages provide nearly as many reasons to choose them? I'm not being deprecatory.

I don't know about Julia nor Elixir, but Dart has Flutter, Golang drives a good chunk of the high-availability internet and Rust is becoming the most secure programming language and several critical applications are being rewritten in Rust.

Their user base is huge (and so is their funding), but it's not only about funding, the reasons to choose them are a lot, there is no silver bullet.

Regards,

Esteban A. Maringolo

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Oddly enough, I've had better results by appealing to history. I guess it has more to do with *how* I did it, my style and creativity. Things like Flutter and Elixir and Kotlin (for Android) are anomalies. Essentially, they benefitted from luck and word of mouth. You can't rely on that. While Smalltalk adoption has grown, if only slightly, it's still so far behind that much of the public continues to believe Smalltalk is dying. For me, that simply isn't good enough. It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That would hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough. Esteban A. Maringolo wrote

Hi Richard,

I don't find Smalltalk easy to evangelize, and in my experience the appeal to history (a variation of the "argumentum ad antiquitatem" fallacy) proved ineffective.

People don't care about who invented MVC, bitblt or JIT, and so make decisions looking into the future, they weight in the past of course, but looking forward is what matters for any decision you take now.

That's why things like Flutter or Elixir and other "new" technologies get the attention they get these days, even when there are no "huge" success cases. I can't judge whether these techs have value, are hyped and/or there is a lot of FOMO in the decision making process. And no, I don't believe it is because of Google shoving it through people throats, it's people finding something valuable and trying to get an professional advantage by learning/adopting it early.

Smalltalk adoption in the last decade has grown by its own merits, _despite_ of the efforts to promote it.

I would bet that any appeal to emotion could be more effective, since most developers get frustrated and any modern Smalltalk dialect can ease that inherent frustration of software development, or even better, turn it into an enjoyable experience (as it's been my case for over a decade).

Have some reasonable big tech/company saying they're going to use X, and you'll have flocks of users trying X.

Esteban A. Maringolo

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 5:03 PM horrido <

horrido.hobbies@

> wrote:

...

Absolutely correct. Each of those languages do have good reasons to choose them. I have never said otherwise.

My point is that Smalltalk gives me many more reasons, many more ways to evangelize it. Smalltalk is very easy to evangelize. That's the premise of the entire article, and if it's wrong, then I should delete the entire article.

Is it wrong?

Esteban A. Maringolo wrote

...

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 2:23 PM horrido <

...

horrido.hobbies@

...

> wrote:

...

I happen to like Dart, Elixir, Golang, Julia, and Rust. But be honest: do these languages provide nearly as many reasons to choose them? I'm not being deprecatory.

I don't know about Julia nor Elixir, but Dart has Flutter, Golang drives a good chunk of the high-availability internet and Rust is becoming the most secure programming language and several critical applications are being rewritten in Rust.

Their user base is huge (and so is their funding), but it's not only about funding, the reasons to choose them are a lot, there is no silver bullet.

Regards,

Esteban A. Maringolo

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Am 10.01.20 um 10:16 schrieb Marten Feldtmann:

That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was IBM ...

Well, twice actually ;-) Many people might not know that HP once was a Smalltalk vendor with their distributed Smalltalk (which was actually a white-label copy of VisualWorks iirc/iiuc)... Big corporations do not warrant the success of a technology. We'd still be using OS/2, BS2000, whatever...  today if that was the case. The much bigger impact on Smalltalk's demise was that all vendors back in the nineties told their customers to switch somewehere else. One of them even never delivered what they had suggested as a replacement... I tried not to jump in here, but I am still a bit surprised how many people state that Smalltalk was so superior to (whatever hyped thing of the day). How many of us have built a nice iOS or Android App in Smalltalk? Do we even havy anything that might allow to do that in a power efficient way? How many of us have built a modern-looking SPA web application in Smalltalk? Smalltalk-only? These are areas where Smalltalk is quite weak and may not excel in any time soon. Let's be honest about it. None of the commercial vendors have announced anything in that direction, and to my knowledge, none of the open-source ones have anything more that the usual JS bridging. Dart/Flutter promises to finally be a platform on which you can write apps for both mobile platforms, the web and maybe even native with one single code base. Does that sound like a dream to developers who need to pick a tool? I guess so. Is there any point in telling people how great Smalltalk is when writing a mobile app or an SPA is hard to almost impossible? I know there are prototypes and even shipped apps on mobile platforms. Some are available and can be used, but are complex and mostly undocumented. One is private and doesn't even have a (public) price tag (yet?). Not really comparable to downloading Flutter and starting to write your first mobile app on a Saturday afternoon. Not sure the productivity advantage we keep praising (be it existent or not) will be noted much by somebody who needs to pick a tool now. So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an application for today's markets. Smalltalk is great. If you don't need a mobile app to accompany your product. It's great if your GUI doesn't have to be sexy as hell or you are happy reinventing wheels. It is great if you only ship to PCs or on the web and don't need a lot of interaction in the browser. Anything else is hard in Smalltalk. If it's not, it is undocumented. I am not sure if energy spent on these "syntax fits on a postcard and, btw,  we have the balloon" articles could be better spent doing something about the problems I mention here. I was in the same boat in the late 90ies and early 2000's with my blog and articles and stuff. All I found out was that nobody actually cares about these old hat stories. Heck, a lot of people these days don't even care about maintainability. You don't like it any more? No prob, we can redo it in this great new (JS) framework anyways. I am not saying anything is wrong about the maintainability of Smalltalk code or greatness of our IDE support. I like it and use it every day. I love programming in Smalltalk and hunting bugs in Smalltalk and fixing customers' problems in Smalltalk. I can fix a bug while the user tells me about theit problem and I am convinced not many other technologies can support me in this as good as Smalltalk does. But, unfortunately, I spend way too much time reinventing GUI glue code fo the web. And, unfortunately, I need to implement a lot of stuff in Javascript. Oh, and unfortunately, there is nothing as good as this if I wanted to ship a nice mobile app to augment our service. When it comes to these, I am not productive. I am not even close to any bleeding edge, and if I want to be, I need to do it on my own. Is it more productive to reinvent a Smalltalk version of VueJS just do be able to do the same as VueJS in JS than it would be to learn JS and VueJS and do some part of my work in those? I wanted to stay out of this thread, because it leads nowhere. But now that I've typed all this, I will push the send button and regret it in a few minutes... Joachim

and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market. Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how to click programs together).

That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java ... so they never can go back.

Marten

Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido:

...

It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That would hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough.

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

jtuchel wrote

Am 10.01.20 um 10:16 schrieb Marten Feldtmann:

...

That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was IBM ...

Well, twice actually ;-) Many people might not know that HP once was a Smalltalk vendor with their distributed Smalltalk (which was actually a white-label copy of VisualWorks iirc/iiuc)...

Big corporations do not warrant the success of a technology. We'd still be using OS/2, BS2000, whatever...  today if that was the case.

True, but major tech adoption *can* greatly increase public mindshare. C#, TypeScript, Golang, Kotlin, Swift, and Rust are good examples.

So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an application for today's markets.

I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent years with languages like C#, Ceylon, Dart, Elixir, F#, Golang, Haskell, Haxe, Julia, and LiveScript. Some of these are cutting-edge languages used for modern applications.

Smalltalk is great. If you don't need a mobile app to accompany your product. It's great if your GUI doesn't have to be sexy as hell or you are happy reinventing wheels. It is great if you only ship to PCs or on the web and don't need a lot of interaction in the browser. Anything else is hard in Smalltalk. If it's not, it is undocumented.

Well, perhaps not for ALL mobile apps, but Cordova is certainly used for cross-platform mobile development. I've used it with Amber and PharoJS and the documentation is pretty good. People also use React Native, so there's no real reason to avoid JS.

I am not sure if energy spent on these "syntax fits on a postcard and, btw,  we have the balloon" articles could be better spent doing something about the problems I mention here. I was in the same boat in the late 90ies and early 2000's with my blog and articles and stuff. All I found out was that nobody actually cares about these old hat stories. Heck, a lot of people these days don't even care about maintainability. You don't like it any more? No prob, we can redo it in this great new (JS) framework anyways.

It's not an either-or situation. We can market Smalltalk *and* address the technical weaknesses of Smalltalk. For example, I'm doing the former and you guys are doing the latter. What's the problem? It would be nice if more Smalltalkers got involved with Smalltalk marketing. I can't do this forever. -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

itlists@schrievkrom.de wrote

Am 10.01.20 um 15:42 schrieb horrido:

...

...

So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an application for today's markets.

I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent

Well, naming it a "lie" is perhaps too strong - but Joachim (did you have a bad Smalltalk day ?????) statement is from my point of view correct - this talking about function point and productivity is an academic point.

Not so academic. After all, the study was based on a huge number of software projects for dozens of programming languages over many years. It doesn't get any more practical than that. The analysis was simplified by adopting the "function points" model which provides a level playing field for all the languages. It's about the amount of time needed to do a certain amount of work, whether that work is specific to a few domains or to many. Some people may take issue with the analysis, but it's there for your consideration at any rate. Since there is no other study of its kind in the world, I choose to use it in my advocacy. Readers can make their own judgement. -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote

But I have not being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.

So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems. Bridging both is pretty difficult.

Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize is *programmer productivity*. I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java, Python, JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better. What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half? It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter "time to market." Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your IT infrastructure. The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't believe it, then we have failed. -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

This is exactly why I also push Smalltalk's simplicity. In the 1970s, Per Brinch Hansen posited that a small, simple language would lead to fewer programmer errors. The result of his work was the Edison programming language. It was published in his book, "Programming a Personal Computer," which is one of my favourite programming books. Of course, Per Brinch Hansen wasn't alone in this belief. It was also shared by Niklaus Wirth who created Pascal and Oberon. So it's not just Smalltalk's live programming environment that we should herald. The size and simplicity of the language is a big deal. Richard Sargent wrote

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 1:52 PM horrido <

horrido.hobbies@

> wrote:

...

Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 wrote

...

But I have not being able to convince any of my coder friends to switch to Pharo instead of C++, Java or Javacript, which by the way, is the language they already know and use to put bread on the table on a daily basis.

So I think that we deal with a paradox: while Smalltalk advocacy is better suited for a Blue Ocean Strategy[2], exploring and implementing new/emerging scenarios and markets, money is already mostly invested in Red Oceans of constituted technologies and practices ecosystems. Bridging both is pretty difficult.

Yes, that is the principal obstacle and challenge. When I'm pushing Smalltalk, I mention the language's simplicity and conciseness, I mention the purity of the object-oriented model, I mention the built-in IDE, and so on. But the key advantage that I emphasize is *programmer productivity*.

I realize it's hard to argue with the availability of jobs for Java, Python, JavaScript, etc. It's hard to argue with their rich ecosystems. It's hard to argue with the status quo of established code bases and IT infrastructures. But we have to make them believe that Smalltalk can cut their development time in half, if not better.

What is it worth to a company to cut their development time in half? It means much lower development cost. It means much shorter "time to market."

It also means much lower error rates. Capers Jones also review errors / lines of code and Smalltalk was substantially better than the C derivative languages. I don't recall the ration, but I think the Namcook report does include it.

Fewer errors means a higher ratio of time spent delivering functionality and a better customer experience. (We can't do anything about bad design and UX practices, of course and unfortunately. Although, I suspect without evidence that Smalltalkers may do a better job of both.)

...

Is this not worth investing time and energy in Smalltalk? Even if the job opportunities aren't there. Even if it means overhauling your IT infrastructure.

The investment can lead to more users and more jobs. If they don't believe it, then we have failed.

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

I wonder how many people in this thread have VisualWorks and/or VisualAge on their machine as well as Pharo? They haven't pushed the user interface the way Squeak and Pharo have, and I personally find the VisualAge interface to be unpleasant. But they both offer a ton of support for connecting to other things. Let's take this list: - lots of good communication libraries into it yes and yes - spread it over Windows, Mac and Linux, yes and yes - make it open source VW and VA are proprietary, but you can get free versions (if you think I can afford to pay for stuff you are sadly mistaken) with all the usual access to the sources. - put some XML and JSON yes and yes - and solve printing, not quite clear, but I think the answer is yes and yes - multithreading/multiprocessing (framework) runtime AND (!) debugging, VW has recently made a lot of progress in that area - scripting it is not clear what you want here. - interconnections with other languages. yes and yes. C, and VA also talks to COBOL nicely. - Try adding a modelling and source code generator VW: very much so. VA: I have a lot of exploring to do yet, but I think so. - Build the whole stuff with concurrency in mind - offer specific data structure to help you here. Not clear what you want here. Smalltalk has had threads since at least 1980. If you built the whole stuff with concurrency in mind, you would not end up with Smalltalk, you'd get Erlang/Elixir. My Smalltalk has concurrent stacks, sets, bags, and dictionaries, and 'aCollection par collect:/select:/inject:into:/...' - Look for suitable persistency options. VW and VA both support serialisation. Pharo of course has Fuel. The big thing that VW and VA offer that Pharo does not -- for obvious reasons -- is stability, with the quantity of documentation that stability makes possible. On Sat, 11 Jan 2020 at 05:15, Marten Feldtmann <itlists@schrievkrom.de> wrote:

Am 10.01.20 um 15:42 schrieb horrido:

...

...

So let's stop trying to convince people with things that mattered some 20 years ago. Even the function point thingie we keep carrying in front of our bellies (Capers-Jones was it?) is a lie when you want to build an application for today's markets.

I disagree that it's a lie. The study is based on thousands of projects and millions of lines of code over a period of several decades, including recent

Well, naming it a "lie" is perhaps too strong - but Joachim (did you have a bad Smalltalk day ?????) statement is from my point of view correct - this talking about function point and productivity is an academic point.

If I am a Java developer and my productivity is around 10% compared to Smalltalk developer it is still useful to use Java - because for my problem there might exists already dozen of libraries and solutions.

Using Smalltalk today is matter of personal taste and love - like many other developers in other languages.

Joachim mentioned the critical points and for me perhaps the following statements are true:

* Smalltalk development over the last decade ran in circles

and due to that

* Smalltalk is not solving the biggest problems any more

So many time has been wasted to make a Smalltalk dialect running in a browser.

I would use (my loved) Smalltalk today only, if

* I have an application, which was written in Smalltalk (and I have one)

* Smalltalk is superior to other solutions in a specific topic (and with Gemstone I have one topic)

When I would start from scratch ... build a headless Smalltalk, put lots of good communication libraries into it, spread it over Windows, Mac and Linux, make it open source and put some XML and JSON and solve printing, multithreading/multiprocessing (framework) runtime AND (!) debugging, scripting, interconnections with other languages. Try adding a modelling and source code generator. Build the whole stuff with concurrency in mind - offer specific data structure to help you here. Look for suitable persistency options.

Go back to the time, where Smalltalk source code was hold in a repository to manually work with it and and not getting software via Github with some broken relationships between packages and nobody knows why.

Use the browser (with Javascript) as the main UI and build a superior interface in Javascript to the backend Smalltalk. Use the Electron framework and build some specific support for Smalltalk into that.

But even with that in mind you will not catch the Javascript developers (because they are on that way already and they do not need Smalltalk), but you may survive as a Smalltalk developer.

Spread the word around, that multi-language development is a MUST and one should support it.

So, to summarize - this is my personal view of Smalltalk today - since 1986, where I first met Georg Heeg on a Atari fair in Düsseldorf seeing the first Smalltalk system in my life.

Marten

-- Marten Feldtmann

The problem is that IBM and HP adopted Smalltalk at a time when Smalltalk wasn't ready nor deserving. There was no major open source Smalltalk. There were several commercial Smalltalk vendors sniping at each other. Smalltalk was totally unprepared for the nascent web. Smalltalk was too heavy to run on the hardware of the day. And C++ had a much stronger OOP narrative. Today, we have many open source Smalltalks. The commercial vendors are more civil. Smalltalk is most definitely web-ready. Smalltalk runs well on the Raspberry Pi. And C++ is in decline, according to TIOBE. Today, we need major tech adoption. Today's generation doesn't care about who adopted what a quarter century ago. There's no reason IBM and HP couldn't pick up the Smalltalk mantle again if they wanted to — the Smalltalk landscape is totally different. The outlook for Smalltalk is a brand new story. Major tech companies are just as vulnerable to hype and marketing as human beings are. They need to be persuaded to adopt Smalltalk. We can do our part to help Amazon, Apple, HP, IBM, and others to see the light. itlists@schrievkrom.de wrote

That happened once in the history of Smalltalk and the big player was IBM ... and actually that really showed impact to the Smalltalk market. Lots of consultings were running around, get pretty much money to teach COBOL programmers how to use Smalltalk (or to be more precise: learn how to click programs together).

That hype perhaps lasted a few years ... and then IBM switched to Java ... so they never can go back.

Marten

Am 09.01.20 um 23:16 schrieb horrido:

...

It would be really nice to have some big tech company adopt Smalltalk, like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, etc. That would hit the ball right out of the park. Alas, I don't see that happening. I'm afraid JP Morgan, Siemens, and Thales aren't good enough.

-- Marten Feldtmann

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html