Amazing Grace

I agree: A man along can not, even if he's wearing several hats: president of the campaign, campaigner, advocate, funding department, founder. But actions like this can turn some eyes towards deeper experience way beyond advertising. It was not my case and I don't know how many start with a technology because they saw it on a advertising campaign. I remember thinking about what was the best context/technology to learn Python, beyond the classical and dumb "hello world" introductions and I found Leo Editor in Linux today or some news, so definitively having news spread helps, as a first step towards bridging newbies and communities, but I think that is once some signal is send the best is to have paths towards deeper engagement (instead of fighting popularity metrics or "someone wrong on the Internet").

About "making Smalltalk great again", I have been wondering: what "greatness" mean and what was lost that needs to be recovered. May be it was some sense of opportunity, the idea that Smalltalk can be useful in the wide world for children and adults in several contexts.

I think that a measure of a healthy community is in its diversity and the empowerment it provides to its members. In that sense, popularity is not the proper measure for greatness and the sense of opportunity is still there.

Cheers,

Offray

Ah ah, yeah.

Man alone can't but keep on trucking, any advertising is fine as people forget if it was good or bad, just that they were exposed to the product.

And engineering is making progress :-)

Phil

On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 8:11 PM, horrido <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was totally surprised to see this today. It completely blows my mind! I
feel like I've won an Oscar.
http://thenewstack.io/can-man-spark-renaissance-smalltalk-programming-language/
<http://thenewstack.io/can-man-spark-renaissance-smalltalk-programming-language/>



--
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Amazing-Grace-tp4929022.html
Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Yes, a more correct statement would be a man alone can spark a lot of things, but renaissance is a collective endeavor. In all of he examples you mention, small teams work in tandem with more broader cultural phenomena, like acceptance of a movie or programming language.

My point was this organic connection between individual advertising and more collective, grassroots efforts (even if communities are small).

Cheers,

Offray

That is not quite true. As a matter of fact the vast majority of examples of huge success were started by one person or a very small team of people. Rarely big successes come from large companies with huge amount of people and investing ridiculous amount on marketing.

Take films for example , the biggest surprise of this decade is "Deadpool" a film that film industry never wanted to make, because its extremely politically incorrect for Holywood . They were forced when the starring actor and his small team "leaked a teaser" that took the youtube by storm. Even then the studio did not want to invest on it so it gave it under 60 mil dollars (the hero actually jokes about it in the movie) when super hero movies have at least 3 times that amount. It made them almost 800 million dollars.

The marketing of the flim also was very weak because of the very low budget , but still went viral because of the very smart way they promoted it. In the end it came down to a very small team of people to generate this insane amount of profit.

Apple is also a similary story one engineer and another dude that wore every other hat took the computer industry by storm. Microsoft the same. Programming languages like Python , Ruby, C, C++ , Perl, Basic etc also the same.

Everywhere you look small teams or a single person taking big risk and not playing it safe like big companies, having massive amounts of success.

So there are no excuses.

All you need is great leadership and money and people will follow.

You do not need something big.

You do not need something great.

You need something fun.

On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 1:31 AM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree: A man along can not, even if he's wearing several hats: president of the campaign, campaigner, advocate, funding department, founder. But actions like this can turn some eyes towards deeper experience way beyond advertising. It was not my case and I don't know how many start with a technology because they saw it on a advertising campaign. I remember thinking about what was the best context/technology to learn Python, beyond the classical and dumb "hello world" introductions and I found Leo Editor in Linux today or some news, so definitively having news spread helps, as a first step towards bridging newbies and communities, but I think that is once some signal is send the best is to have paths towards deeper engagement (instead of fighting popularity metrics or "someone wrong on the Internet").

About "making Smalltalk great again", I have been wondering: what "greatness" mean and what was lost that needs to be recovered. May be it was some sense of opportunity, the idea that Smalltalk can be useful in the wide world for children and adults in several contexts.

I think that a measure of a healthy community is in its diversity and the empowerment it provides to its members. In that sense, popularity is not the proper measure for greatness and the sense of opportunity is still there.

Cheers,

Offray

On 07/01/17 17:03, [hidden email] wrote:

Ah ah, yeah.

Man alone can't but keep on trucking, any advertising is fine as people forget if it was good or bad, just that they were exposed to the product.

And engineering is making progress :-)

Phil

On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 8:11 PM, horrido <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was totally surprised to see this today. It completely blows my mind! I
feel like I've won an Oscar.
http://thenewstack.io/can-man-spark-renaissance-smalltalk-programming-language/
<http://thenewstack.io/can-man-spark-renaissance-smalltalk-programming-language/>



--
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Amazing-Grace-tp4929022.html
Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.