On 10/24/04 6:10 PM, "Mark Grand" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In the commercial sector, it is hard to find Lisp or Smalltalk people. > Reimplementing in a more common language will, over time, reduce costs and > make the progress of software development more predictable. This is what managers think. Managers are wrong. Converting a Lisp or Smalltalk program always increases costs and makes the progress of software development dramatically less predictable. It isn't even close. I've seen Smalltalk projects in trouble because the programmers all left. This was mostly back in the days when Smalltalk was very hot and there were programmers making $2000 a day. (Not many, but a few.) It was hard to keep good programmers on a project, especially with bad management. Managers didn't have that problem with COBOL or C. But now Smalltalk is not in such demand. Salaries are the same as for other languages and Smalltalk programmers don't move around any more than other programmers. It is hard to hire a lot of Smalltalkers fast, but it is easy to hire them slow. So, you shouldn't try to have a 100 person Smalltalk project, but those were always bad ideas. Part of the magic of Smalltalk is that you can do with ten people what would take 100 with another language. It is well known that the key to successful software projects is getting good people. Good people prefer productive programming languages. In my experience, the best programmers prefer "weird" languages like Smalltalk or Lisp. Or Ruby, or Ocaml. Productive programming languages let your development group be smaller, reducing management problems. -Ralph Johnson _______________________________________________ patterns-discussion mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/patterns-discussion
