On 21/03/13 10:09 PM, Victor Stan wrote:
Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment.
The "why did Smalltalk not take off" debate is a regular occurrence on Smalltalk discussion forums.
There used to be Smalltalk implementations that targeted smaller companies. Digitalk Smalltalk was one of these. Unfortunately, at the critical WWW breakout moment, Digitalk was bought by ParcPlace, and eventually killed. Perhaps an independent Digitalk could have adapted as you would have expected.
However, while I'm guessing that most developers in ST are still heavily oriented toward enterprise platforms, we can all benefit by bringing aboard more developers and creating a large market and demand for ST developers, and I'm going to go on a limb here and say that that's not going to happen until we can integrate with the tools and culture of contemporary web development. Anyone have opinions on this?
IMHO, many in the community agree with your points, but the community is just not big enough at this point to address it all, as quickly as everyone would like (i.e. already done).
I hope I can get better at ST and try to contribute myself to some things that interest me more... Cheers, Victor Stan Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor
Since you're in Toronto, have you ever come to the Toronto Smalltalk User Group (http://smalltalk.toronto.on.ca) meetings? We've been meeting for 20 or more years. You just missed the MagLev talk. The July Patio Night would be a good time to get filled in by old-time TO-Smalltalkers.
