Excerpts from Esteban A. Maringolo's message of 2015-07-23 16:51:10 +0200: > What I think we miss here, is the generation of the users adopting > Pharo/Smalltalk. > > For many developers over they 30's (like me), when I show them Pharo or > tell them about what/how it does some stuff, they get curious and/or try > it. They might even learnt Smalltalk back at the university. > Usually they have used/suffered a lot of languages or tools and can > appreciate the benefits of Pharo, as well as to identify its shortcomings.
that's a good point. i also fit into that group, picking up smalltalk because i want to expand and get a different perspective on how development is done. > When I talk to "new programmers" (20-25 years old), almost all of them > don't get attracted by it. > Why? I couldn't tell. Mainly because they can't use the few tools/patterns > they already learnt how to, barely, use. yes, the problem with people coming out of school. they expect that school adequately prepared them for future jobs, thus assume that what they learned in school is enough for the rest of their career. it takes several years of working for reality to sink in. > Those "kids" will grow up and besides doing non-toyish software, maybe will > lead teams or get to make decisions about what technology to use. Maybe we > should ask ourselves what technologies do startups choose to "invent" new > solutions? Why? whatever the lead tech happens to be familiar with. and if they are not familiar with anything then they'll use rails. > Software became pop-culture some years ago, and I feel we're > Jazz/Classical. I like the latter, but trying to attract pop being > classical is a dead end. totally. it is exactly the feeling i have about smalltalk and lisp. i learned both because i wanted to know if the newer languages everyone is using are really any better. i'd expected that they would learn and improve over older languages. but i had to discover that that's not the case. i used to believe that languages like python, ruby and pike were a new generation of languages that improved over the old languages like c and c++, but i was disappointed and had to find out that the innovation already happened a few decades earlier and almost everything else following was a step backwards in some ways. greetings, martin. -- eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life -- chief engineer eKita.co pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org secretary beijinglug.org mentor fossasia.org foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com unix sysadmin Martin Bähr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/
