I think that the examples related with stuff invented 30 years ago will depend on the audience. Most programmers, young ones in particular, have a deep lack of knowledge about the history of technology , they barely know about the tools they use everyday, and they don't have interest in learning about them either. So saying to them that Smalltalk invented BitBlt, is like talking them about punched cards. At least that is my experience.
About the points, one thing that I found really useful is doing actual TDD or programming in the debugger, sometimes I get impressed myself when while having an open debugger I add an instance variable in another Browser (or even in the debugger), and have such modification already available to all the instances I have in the context of debugging (and the image, of course). Showing how productive you can be is something that also gets the interest of newcomers, unfortunately being productive is not building greater things with the same or less effort, but building the same with less efforts, hence the proliferation of one-liners and viral code snippets to attract naive programmers or people looking for something different, and are lazy to embrace something with a steep learning curve. Another good point is that when you develop using Smalltalk you (or at least I do) feel like you're inside your system, you program "from the inside", it is an immersive experience. With other tools, even with really advanced IDE's you never get that immersion, you feel like moving levers, and manipulating a machine, and advanced and most of the times decent machine, but the experience is less "humane" (using Tudor's use of the word) and not immersive. My points are not based Pharo stories, but are backed by 10 years of Smalltalk use, starting with Squeak, and passing through VW, VisualSmalltalk, VAST and Dolphin. I use Pharo, and enjoy it, though I'm not Kent Beck. Best regards, -- Esteban M. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/what-is-your-pharo-story-tp4651692p4651732.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
