J.F. Rick wrote:
Just because Smalltalk is not currently popular doesn't mean that it
can't be in the future. The key, to me, is finding a killer
application. [...]
Cheers,
Jeff
If "killer application" is too big a job then at maybe a several "small
killer utilities". I had occasion today to go to need to scrape about
80 product PDF manuals from a vendor's technical support site. These
were presented in a table having "DocumentID", "Description" , "Version"
and "Link" columns. I needed to download them from the Link and save
files named as "DoocumentID-Version-Description.PDF" . As I spent the
hour doing this manually one at a time, while I knew there were numerous
web-scraping tools, I knew they wouldn't give the the flexibility that
might be achieved with Smalltalk - being able to inspect live data to
devise how to dice, slice and script this. In addition with my corporate
locked-down desktop I could not install them to run anyway. A small
end-user Smalltalk app doing only this, released on sites like cnet and
tucow and freshmeat could build a following. People wont even realise
they are downloading a whole development environment - except the help
file for devising their own scripts would lead them into it.
So I throw out the question.... What "small" end-user utilities do you
think Pharo could perform well at?
cheers -ben
