> > > Yes, people love new toys. Especially when they come from a company with > colors ;) > > "is climbing in popularity." is true for others as well - next question on > this list will be > if we should port and run on Swift from Apple, ... >
I have that itch to disagree with you and point you to the flaws of your argument but unfortunately you are very much correct. My experience with programming languages is that people don't give up their comfort zone so easily. I have seen this happening with Jython , its basically python run on JVM , can directly use Java libraries out of the box and it can even use cpython libraries. Yet it seems its used more by people that work anyway on the JVM than cpython people. Actually I dont think it would be an exaggeration to say that jython is even more unpopular than pharo right now. Dart is even in worst position because its a new language and I dont think Google will replace Java on Android or Javascript on the browser with Dart any time soon. On the other hand I disagree that Swift is in a similar case because Apple has way more control over its market because it makes both the software and the hardware and , and this is a big factor, Swift IS a replacement to Objective C. Also Swift had a very positive reception from developers which another factor into this equation. I dont see Dart generating as much noise. Also Apple is 100% behind Swift, the moment Yosemite came out the first update to Swift (XCODE) was for iOS and now a new update came out for MacOSX as well. I dont think its a bad thing to port smalltalk to Dart , I do think it will be advantageous for both smalltalk and dart but dont expect that you will be getting thousands of users any time soon. I am in a similar boat of giving access to python libraries to pharo user with my latest project, again my expectations are very low on how many people will use this and I don't blame them. Sounds great in theory in practice you run into all sort of technical problems.
