Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why startups succeed

Check out this amazing TEDTalk:

Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why startups succeed
http://on.ted.com/h15YB

Excerpts from S Krish's message of 2015-07-20 17:47:50 +0200:
> Check out this amazing TEDTalk:
> Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why startups succeed
> http://on.ted.com/h15YB

meh.
read the transcript if you want to save the time,
but to save even more time, here is the summary:
  "The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the
   difference between success and failure. Team and execution came in second,
   and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea,
   that actually came in third. ...
   The last two, business model and funding"

he talks about the need to assess timing, but unfortunately doesn't tell much
about how to do it, which is really the crux of the matter.

in hindsight it is of course easy to see how the timing factor applies.
but before, it's like trying to predict the future.

and then, how does that relate to pharo or smalltalk in general?
how can we assess the timing for pharo's success?

did smalltalk miss its chance, so we should give up?
or is it still coming? glass bowl anyone?

there is no actionable advice in there.
what shall we do?
wait, and we'll know the timing is right when we see it?

the only advice i can extract is that, because we can't predict the timing,
don't put all eggs in the same basket, and while pushing pharo, don't push so
hard that the future depends on the push to succeed. instead make sure that the
project can continue even if the time is not right, so that it is still alive
when the time is finally right.

to actually make an attempt at prediction we'd have to look at developer needs.
what are developers needs now, and does pharo deliver to fill those needs?
(i believe it is pretty clear that pharo is still missing a few things, mostly
on the integration side with other systems)

can we predict what developers will need and expect in 5 years, and can pharo
develop to match those needs?

these questions are dear to my heart because i am asking them myself for my own
project. i believe, i have a solution that many developers need, but as far as
i can tell most developers are not aware of the problem yet. i hope that in
time they will become aware, and that by then my project will be ready and thrive.

we'll see.

greetings, martin.

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Martin Bähr wrote

did smalltalk miss its chance, so we should give up?
or is it still coming? glass bowl anyone?

Using Unix - which took 50 years to takeover the world - as a metric, we should be hitting our stride in about 2030 ;)

Hi Jose,

Thank you for your well written feedback. It is very important to hear a voice like yours. It is hard to articulate why we like Pharo/Smalltalk. Like you say, it has to do because it is so different, because we learn from it, because it empowers us, because we feel it is a good way to develop software.

Sven

PS: I didn't really like the talk either, doing something new, trailblazing is always hard, often fails and sometimes works, afterwards is always seems like 'it was the right time'.

Jose San Leandro wrote

If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how
popular Smalltalk is.

Very useful, and not just a newbie opinion. On the Amber list, Richard Eng, who is working to make Smalltalk mainstream, was disappointed by his blog post stats. I responded in agreement with you [2]:

    Unix, which Alan Kay describes as "a budget of bad ideas" (and I agree), took almost 50 years to take over the world [1]. Maybe you're 10 years too early to make Smalltalk popular ;) But seriously, I think you're using the wrong metrics. The great majority of people are instrumental thinkers i.e. they judge every new thing by how useful it is to their current goals. This is the definition of the Pink Plane. Given that the real value of Smalltalk is that it's prototype Dynabook software, which is way into the blue plane of computing, convincing the masses of its value is extremely unlikely - and not required! If say 10% of programmers are interested in the inherent value of ideas, and we capture this 10%, that will be more than enough critical mass. And given your report of relative popularity of your blog posts, 570/7000 = 8% doesn't sound too far off ;)

BTW I'm not saying don't try to reach as many people as possible, only to reframe what failure looks like.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/07/is-unix-now-the-most-successful-operating-system-of-all-time/

[2] http://forum.world.st/A-Gentle-Introduction-to-Amber-tp4831244p4833048.html

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 12:27 AM, Martin Bähr
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Its like the Weak Anthropic principle explanation for the question of
why the cosmological constants of our universe seem so finely tuned to
allow our existence...

   If the universe was not able to produce us, we wouldn't be here to
ask such questions.

cheers -ben

Hi jose

Thanks for this interesting testimony.

If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how popular Smalltalk is.

I came to Smalltalk because a friend of mine (Rafa Luque) was enthusiastic about it, and suggested me to try it.

The candy was not to build applications faster, but to think differently, to question what and how we approach problems with mainstream, industry "best practice" technologies and languages.

I see Smalltalk more like what security researches think of their discipline: it's a process, not a list of tools or recipes. After almost two decades of developing commercial software for others and open-source projects (mainly) for myself, using mostly Java but also Lisp, Smalltalk has blown my mind.

Could you give an example? Because I have problem to understand (since I'm born with a lisp, did my studies with an object lisp and found Smalltalk (yet another object lispish).

That wouldn't have happened if I'd tried Seaside just because I wanted to try a different web framework.

In my case, to approach Smalltalk I needed a certain state of mind. You have to be aware programming is not memorizing design patterns and pay for an IDE to do most things for you, including to check for non-functional stuff nobody seems to care about. We're in the "i'm proud to be lazy" era. I've seen smart people reject Smalltalk just because they don't seem to care about what they do, or at least they don't want to invest their time and energy.

Probably there's a way to convert Pharo in node.js or Go, to make people use Seaside instead of ruby on rails. More people potentially means more financial support, and a better, sooner, full-featured, Pharo.

Would be nice :)
I think that having powerful libraries never hurts. This is why the stack sven is building is great.

But even then, Smalltalk empowers people to think differently and gives the means to do so, and to promote that has to tackled differently.

I'd focus on how using Smalltalk gradually makes you a better professional, before blaming ourselves for not yet providing sophisticated frameworks anyone can use even if they don't know what they're doing.

:)
Again I need examples
Because you come from outside so this is obvious but for me I have problem to make what you say explicit.
I would like to use your experience when I'm teaching :)

Let's take the Scala or the Git case. What made people invest in learning them was, at least in part, that they felt smarter.

:)

We should focus on that: comparing how the same problem is solved in other languages. Showing what live programming is. Don't be humble just to be polite.

On the other hand, Smalltalk enables us to face problems that are potentially unachievable in other languages / ecosystems. Let's define on a "Pharo way to do X", which inevitably starts building a domain-specific browser, a custom IDE, and recipes for common scenarios.

In summary, as Martin Bahr says, it's critically important to ensure we can survive indefinitely until the perfect "timing" arrives. But don't punish ourselves too much for not being popular. For me, the greatest value lies elsewhere.

Thanks. For me I just want to build a great system and step by step we are doing it.
So exciting: small kernel, new graphics, vector graphics, cool web stack, better tools.... The pieces are coming together.

2015-07-21 3:14 GMT+02:00 Sean P. DeNigris <[hidden email]>:

Martin Bähr wrote
> did smalltalk miss its chance, so we should give up?
> or is it still coming? glass bowl anyone?

Using Unix - which took 50 years to takeover the world - as a metric, we
should be hitting our stride in about 2030 ;)



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Cheers,
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View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Bill-Gross-The-single-biggest-reason-why-startups-succeed-tp4838376p4838456.html
Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Thanks Jose, Sean and Steph,

I think that this is an important conversation, so here are my two
cents. It started small but suddenly it became long, so thanks in
advance for those who read it all. May be I'm giving the details Steph
asked for (may be to many details :-P).

For my Smalltalk is a better way to explore ideas via digital
prototypes. I have been using Linux since 1996 and have a glimpse of
Smalltalk in 2005 and despite of making my MSc thesis on Squeak / Bots
Inc as modeling and learning devices for collective problem solving[1]
and even being an active member of the Squeakland / Etoys community as
teacher and a speaker in community gatherings, the time for me at that
moment was too early: Me and my students were getting older but
Smalltalk didn't feel like growing with us. So I keep using Linux since
that time until now. My vehicle for writing, organizing and exploring
ideas via digital technologies were mainly TeXmacs[2], Leo[3],
IPython[4], Wikis (MoinMoin, tiddlywiki, dokuwiki), webframeworks
(web2py [4a]) and lately pandoc[5] and LaTeX.


What put Smalltalk in the radar again was the start of my Ph.D research
in 2010[6], at that moment as a important historical reference and an
intuition, but after finishing the "theoretical" part year and a half
ago (with some long pauses) I was finally able to put hands on the
technology again. It was the second half 2014.

I agree with Jose about Smalltalk as a different way to solve problems
and to empower people by let them think different. I have witness this
with myself. The problem I chose was "interactive documentation" and in
my approach documents are interactive trees which can arrange writing as
a "layered emergent dynamic process". I had this idea with Leo and
IPython[7][7a], but the file system approach was too complex: a lot of
different technologies, ways to think (data bases, procedural,
imperative, declarative, and object programming), frameworks and
technologies (qt, zeroMQ, javascript, JQuery, (I)Python, etc). With
Pharo I can explore the same idea in a uniform, comprehensive
interactive environment. This is still a pretty small ecosystem and
there are not so much mature libraries (SciSmalltalk is pretty small
compared to SciPython for example and web2py is easier to use that
Seaside or Aida), but I can, with a little help of the community, go
pretty far by myself with this idea of interactive tree-like
documentation. I would like to be better and to have more time and
continuity in this effort, instead of this activity rush + long pauses
rhythm, but even with my time and knowledge limitations I can be more
agile in testing ideas in this environment that in anything else I have
tested before.

It required Pharo, GT Tools, Roassal and Deep Into Pharo to feel the
environment empowering for me again and it took almost 10 years from my
first exposure to Smalltalk for learning and modeling in Squeak to
making my first "app" for interactive documentation in Pharo, again for
learning and modeling but for hackerspaces/citizens instead of
universities/students. 10 years to become again an active member of the
Smalltalk community (and member of the Pharo association [*]), despite
of being still a newbie and writing rookie code. I would like to
decrease for others this time between the first exposure to Smalltalk
and the continuous use of it as a vehicle for thinking different. That's
why I'm making workshops in our hackerspace and using data narratives
and visualization to teach young and adults about this other tools and
their ways of empowering thinking by writing/publishing differently.

So, if Unix took 50 years to take the world and, in my personal story,
Smalltalk took 10 years to empower my world, I would not be concerned
with quick popularity, but with fluid long lasting empowerment. I think
that we need to talk better with the "external" world (databases,
input/output formats and operative system libraries and process,
frameworks and communities) but for me the main value of Smalltalk is
the way it empowers individuals and communities by being a continuous,
interactive, coherent, extensible and comprehensible system to
explore/express ideas by yourself and that's something you can not get
easily in the Unix / file system world, because of its origins and its
development history[**].

Cheers,

Offray

[*] I can't find myself as a member, despite of paying my year
subscription. There is any way to trace what's happening?
[**] About the discussion pointed by Sean on Unix, I would recommend
"Unix haters handbook" [8] and Tracing the dynabook[9] for arguments
about the ideas of Unix versus the ideas of the Dynabook/Smalltalk.

Links
====

[1] http://mutabit.com/deltas/repos.fossil/offray-maestria-tesis/index
[2] http://texmacs.org/
[3] http://leoeditor.com/
[4] http://ipython.org/
[4a] http://web2py.com/
[5] http://pandoc.org/
[6] http://mutabit.com/deltas/repos.fossil/doctorado-offray/index
[7]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/on-deepness-and-complexity-of-ipython-documents.html
[7a]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/la-forma-en-que-escribo-para-el-doctorado.html
[8] http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
[9] http://tkbr.ccsp.sfu.ca/dynabook/

On 21/07/15 09:58, Sean P. DeNigris wrote:

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.

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:)

This is why we should continue to rethink our tools, frameworks, process

Hi esteban

we need to be much much better one talking to external libraries.
Our esteban is working on it.

Stef

Peter, 

At your joung age you might have very good reasons to have chosen Pharo over anything else as I did a lot of years ago. I discovered Smaltalk by chance when I was 21 years old and already had my years developing with Perl and was starting to learn Java. Fortunately I started making a living out of it since I was 22 until today.

But if you want to make the community bigger you have to look into why people don't chose it, otherwise we'll be "preaching to the choir" as we many times are.

These days FP is on the bull trend, having been there way before than Smalltalk (Lisp, Haskell, etc. and their reincarnations Clojure, Scala...). What makes them popular most of the times is not the techology per se, but who uses it.

Regards!

Esteban A. Maringolo

2015-07-23 13:06 GMT-03:00 Peter Uhnák <[hidden email]>:

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

As someone who (still) falls into this range I see several (unrelated) reasons why they might not like it.

For me personally I encountered Pharo in University in "Conceptual modeling" class, where it was introduced pretty much as "Oh, by the way, here is this completely new environment that you've never seen nor worked with that we will use, but we will not tell you much about it"... so my first experience was quite awful. I mean... I couldn't even write the code in my favorite text editor and I had to use this weird browser where system code and my own code were mangled up. Image crashing meant I lost my work. Now I know I can just replay changes but I didn't know it back then (the focus of the class was modeling, not Pharo). Bugs (this was Pharo 2 (and 3 beta)) were commonplace and since I had no experience I couldn't tell whether it was my fault or the system's fault... it was overall very unpleasant.

I later (after the course) basically foced myself to look at Pharo again because I didn't understand why would people bother to use it... so clearly there must have been some value I've missed. And I don't regret that decision a bit, but I had to go look for it. So statistically speaking from the year I did the class only two or three students (to my knowledge) kept their interest out of 119 (so 2-3% maybe). Other years were no different.

Next year there will be a dedicated class for Pharo so I'm curious if this will change somehow.

But there may be other reasons why students may not like it... (looking again from my experience)

From university experience perspective, the previous year (for us, and from what I talked with people it's not that different also for other universities) was a heavy massage in C and C++ where we were implementing very basic concepts (hashtables, and other data structures). A year where your main concern was to pass a automated checking system... so mostly memory management and creating write-only code. Plus warped concepts of OOP (so to use actual student quotes: "C++ is great for explaining OOP", "You can do OOP in pure C", or "OOP is useless, long confusing code, full of getters and setters, .. and slow. Inline assembler is much faster"). So with such concepts it's hard to give them OOP language, because they already made up their mind.

Yet another reason I can see might be that when you are young you are more inclined to follow what's cool and modern and popular and shit (or has the word "game" in its name).

So if today's world revolves around connectivity, internet, JavaScript and whatnot, then giving them a isolated environment with non-mainstream technology and a dead language they've never heard of (I thought that Smalltalk was an obscure language that died in '80s, before I found that actually it's alive and doing quite well) will not be met well with appreciation.

But no reason to stop there... there market for Smalltalk is arguably small, so people will prefer language that is in demand by the market (after all, I pay my bills with JavaScript/PHP/webstuff, and not Pharo; because it's much easier to find a job; with Pharo I would have to basically start my own business to be profitable and then I would be doing business and not programming).

And last (but not least), finding support for it is much harder, since the community is smaller. So it's almost all or nothing scenario.

Also some of the arguments here can be applied also for functional programming (which I haven't (shame on me) even engaged with, besides messing with Haskell in XMonad (and multi-paradigm languages that have some functional concepts).

Finally I don't think that you should expect the same behavior from young people (<26) as from adults. They will have different values, views, and whatnot... I mean that's the point of growing up and acquiring experience. All you can do is offer this alternative option and provide support. Being mainstream or non-mainstream is akin to self-fulfilling prophecy. (Of course exceptions happen, JavaScript was raised to glory because the language happen to be in the right place (browser) at the right time (boom of modern web)). 

Hmm... and this post ended up being much chaotic and longer than I intended to... but whatever.

Peter

p.s.: I like the music analogy since I was listening to k-pop while working (webtech), and now I am listening to ambient music when writing about Pharo :p

I am not a professional programmer, nor am I young, nor a graybeard. :)

I found Smalltalk about 1999 in the form of Squeak. My biggest problems have been not in learning Smalltalk. But rather some of the projects I wanted to do needed to interface without outside libraries. Because I always felt more comfortable and productive in Smalltalk than anything else I have ever used. Even when I could not use Squeak/Pharo for whatever I was doing at the moment. I kept returning. And over time my requirements changed and the requirements Squeak/Pharo are able to fulfill keep improving.

I think one thing that we really need to do when talking to people who have tried Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo and were not able to use it for whatever reason. To periodically keep trying Squeak/Pharo. The magical intersection of experience, knowledge, understanding, project/personal requirements and Squeak/Pharo's abilities might wonderfully meet. Squeak and Pharo are in this for the long game. Keep trying. At some point more and more people will find that where they are in life and where Squeak/Pharo are at that time, things just click.

Cog, Spur, Sista, 64bit plus all of the growing projects and libraries make for an ever increasingly attractive and powerful object environment empowering its users to accomplish great things.

Jimmie Houchin

for me as a beginner a big turn off was the quality of documentation and my fear that third party libraries will not be that well supported because of the size of the community meaning more bugs less features etc.  It was certainly a much bigger struggle learning pharo than learning python.

After 2 years Pharo has gotten much better in both areas.

I can't blame people who try Pharo and are turned off by these things, but I still recommend it for at least giving it a try.

In my case because I have found an easy way to combine python with pharo made it easy to move to pharo. I still love to work with Pharo and its getting better each year because of the passion of people behind this and of course their hard work.

I also like to support a project that follows my taste on how I like to code , even if its not that popular. Actually its easier to feel that you make a difference in a small community. 

Something tells me I will be sticking around for a long long time :)

I dont think there is a secret to success or a simple advice.

I once read that "success" is name of the tip of an iceberg called "constant failure".

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 8:25 PM stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi esteban

we need to be much much better one talking to external libraries.
Our esteban is working on it.

Stef

Le 23/7/15 18:52, Esteban A. Maringolo a écrit :

Peter, 

At your joung age you might have very good reasons to have chosen Pharo over anything else as I did a lot of years ago. I discovered Smaltalk by chance when I was 21 years old and already had my years developing with Perl and was starting to learn Java. Fortunately I started making a living out of it since I was 22 until today.

But if you want to make the community bigger you have to look into why people don't chose it, otherwise we'll be "preaching to the choir" as we many times are.

These days FP is on the bull trend, having been there way before than Smalltalk (Lisp, Haskell, etc. and their reincarnations Clojure, Scala...). What makes them popular most of the times is not the techology per se, but who uses it.

Regards!

Esteban A. Maringolo

2015-07-23 13:06 GMT-03:00 Peter Uhnák <[hidden email]>:

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

As someone who (still) falls into this range I see several (unrelated) reasons why they might not like it.

For me personally I encountered Pharo in University in "Conceptual modeling" class, where it was introduced pretty much as "Oh, by the way, here is this completely new environment that you've never seen nor worked with that we will use, but we will not tell you much about it"... so my first experience was quite awful. I mean... I couldn't even write the code in my favorite text editor and I had to use this weird browser where system code and my own code were mangled up. Image crashing meant I lost my work. Now I know I can just replay changes but I didn't know it back then (the focus of the class was modeling, not Pharo). Bugs (this was Pharo 2 (and 3 beta)) were commonplace and since I had no experience I couldn't tell whether it was my fault or the system's fault... it was overall very unpleasant.

I later (after the course) basically foced myself to look at Pharo again because I didn't understand why would people bother to use it... so clearly there must have been some value I've missed. And I don't regret that decision a bit, but I had to go look for it. So statistically speaking from the year I did the class only two or three students (to my knowledge) kept their interest out of 119 (so 2-3% maybe). Other years were no different.

Next year there will be a dedicated class for Pharo so I'm curious if this will change somehow.

But there may be other reasons why students may not like it... (looking again from my experience)

From university experience perspective, the previous year (for us, and from what I talked with people it's not that different also for other universities) was a heavy massage in C and C++ where we were implementing very basic concepts (hashtables, and other data structures). A year where your main concern was to pass a automated checking system... so mostly memory management and creating write-only code. Plus warped concepts of OOP (so to use actual student quotes: "C++ is great for explaining OOP", "You can do OOP in pure C", or "OOP is useless, long confusing code, full of getters and setters, .. and slow. Inline assembler is much faster"). So with such concepts it's hard to give them OOP language, because they already made up their mind.

Yet another reason I can see might be that when you are young you are more inclined to follow what's cool and modern and popular and shit (or has the word "game" in its name).

So if today's world revolves around connectivity, internet, JavaScript and whatnot, then giving them a isolated environment with non-mainstream technology and a dead language they've never heard of (I thought that Smalltalk was an obscure language that died in '80s, before I found that actually it's alive and doing quite well) will not be met well with appreciation.

But no reason to stop there... there market for Smalltalk is arguably small, so people will prefer language that is in demand by the market (after all, I pay my bills with JavaScript/PHP/webstuff, and not Pharo; because it's much easier to find a job; with Pharo I would have to basically start my own business to be profitable and then I would be doing business and not programming).

And last (but not least), finding support for it is much harder, since the community is smaller. So it's almost all or nothing scenario.

Also some of the arguments here can be applied also for functional programming (which I haven't (shame on me) even engaged with, besides messing with Haskell in XMonad (and multi-paradigm languages that have some functional concepts).

Finally I don't think that you should expect the same behavior from young people (<26) as from adults. They will have different values, views, and whatnot... I mean that's the point of growing up and acquiring experience. All you can do is offer this alternative option and provide support. Being mainstream or non-mainstream is akin to self-fulfilling prophecy. (Of course exceptions happen, JavaScript was raised to glory because the language happen to be in the right place (browser) at the right time (boom of modern web)). 

Hmm... and this post ended up being much chaotic and longer than I intended to... but whatever.

Peter

p.s.: I like the music analogy since I was listening to k-pop while working (webtech), and now I am listening to ambient music when writing about Pharo :p