[ANN] What are reasons NOT to use Smalltalk?

Dear all,

This thread is a bit old, but anyways: here are my two cents on the question 'What are reasons not to use Smalltalk'. Thanks, Horrido, to constantly promote these kind of discussions.

I think that your polls are mixing very different reasons - for instance, we choose development tools in different settings: as a group, as a firm, as an individual -- and for different purposes - for one of the projects, for some projects, as a general orientation of a firm, a specific team, or an individual. So I don't respond to these polls since it would be hard to answer properly, and "all of the above" is probably useless to you.

What struck me about Pharo is the beauty and simplicity of the language and environment - and its great community, of course! Despite the fact that I have to use other tools because of my habits, environment, colleagues, students, and customers, I keep running Pharo almost every day, testing the ideas - it became a habit. I think that the consortium is well aware of the important things to make Pharo a feasible toolset for serious development, like stability, the proper GUI support, and books. 

In my own experience, Pharo as a language is pretty mature. In every-day situation with Pharo I deal with small challenges like remembering how to change all spaces with hyphens in a String - as I do in other languages when I try to remember all the methods that are already made for me in a certain language/libraries. This is not a problem.

The real challenge is somewhere else: it's the comprehension of all the packages that are needed for a full-size project, from persistence to GUI. When documentation is scarce you have to go more or less deep into the code which I often find quite challenging. Besides commentaries, it helps tremendously if developers would always use typed variables to indicate API, like

properties: aDictionary

or

presentWith: aWAPresenter

instead of 

properties: someProperties

and

presentWith: anObject

It's true that Pharo is not among "strongly typed" languages, however we sometimes forget that typing is not just a technical thing to avoid run-time errors, but it also gives information to other developers what's going on in the code and who should be the receiver.

In some packages I also miss the use of superclasses - you can see that a bunch of classes directly inherits from Object or some other general class, however they could be organized in a better inheritance hierarchies, thus additionaly explaining their common and individual behaviour. 

Both and many other concepts are nicely described in books Learning OOP and Pharo with Style. I know that we are always eager to develop the package and satisfied when it works - and then it's hard to find the time to tie up these little pieces. I hope I don't sound too patronizing - I'm the same myself.

Years ago Borland made a breakthrough with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. For both tools they prepared two sets of books: user manual and reference manual. Books about Pharo are very nice and helpful, they are user manuals. If all the crucial packages would respect typed variables and class hierarchies, we won't need reference manuals at all :-)

So, yeah, I think that the tipping point for Pharo is the question of how much time a developer should use to rediscover the behaviour which is already there. 

Best wishes

Tomaz