On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Paulo R. Dellani <dell...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Dear all, > > after using Smalltalk for several years I developed a passion for the > language (how not to?), and Pharo is just so great to develop with. > So thank you guys for keeping this wonderful project running. > > Unfortunately, it is not easy to always point out why Smalltalk > should be employed as "main development language" in a team > or for a project. In the last discussion of this sort I was confronted > with the question "where are we going to get new smalltalk > developers if our startup grows or if you go?". Well, I had no > good answer to that. What would have you answered? > > Cheers, > > Paulo > > > When Smalltalk comes up on reddit, news.ycombinator, etc, I often see comments "Used Smalltalk 10 years ago, loved it, but not in my day job for years ..." The guess the lack of a good business oriented OSS Smalltalk years ago may be to blame. Only supposition, but with the long history of Smalltalker, the pool to draw from may be greater than first apparent. The main problem may be that these people are not searching for Smalltalk jobs due to the perceived availability of jobs. There would obviously be some lag, but for longer term planning, talk to your local education providers about introducing Smalltalk as the "best" environment for teaching OO, and then take the talented students from there. Consider contacting the academic partners here... http://consortium.pharo.org/ Another approach depending on the project structure might be to "just" prototype in Smalltalk (because its highly productive to explore a domain with its built in data persistence) and per Fred Brooks plan to throw it away to cleanly implement in a mainstream language once you "know" what needs to be done. I remember seeing one case reported here that the prototype worked so well that the client didn't bother with the second step. cheers -ben
