Am 02.06.2011 um 13:53 schrieb Stéphane Ducasse:
> and what do you do to change the situation?
>
I have reported what I have been told after promoting Smalltalk.
Alas I neither have the luck to work with Smalltalk on my daily job nor much
free time due to my family.
I am not able to follow the pace Pharo is developing at. So the best thing I
can do is to try to convince people
to have a look at Smalltalk. But that is hard. Most developers don't even
bother to have a look at it because
it's not mainstream (they never heard of it). And if they do, they will
complain immediately about not working on
files, the user interface (strange widgets, misuse of buttons, missing
integration in the host os) and lack of version management.
If, in the rare case, someone takes a closer look, he will complain like my
friend: annoying window sizes and positions,
cluttered windows all over.
The new generation of developers is used to use tabbed window IDE's like
Eclipse, NetBeans and VisualStudio.
Smalltalk systems have to fight against these well supported products.
And furthermore I like to emphasis what I wrote before: Squeak's and Pharo's
problem is also, that they are seen as tools and not products.
Tools are being developed and used for a certain problem to solve. Pharo seems
to have two major fields of use:
1. web development (in combination with Seaside)
2. research
Of course this is fully ok because it's free and nobody can ask you or other
people involved for certain enhancements.
But if you want to spread the use of Smalltalk you should hear to voices from
the outside. The quality of the code and Smalltalk's
elegance and kind of OO are only seen after the first hurdle is being taken.
And I count the user interface and the development tools as the first hurdle.
In other words: It takes time to convince people that Smalltalk's way of doing
things has big advantages over C# or Java. But most people don't give us the
time...
Regards,
Andreas
