Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 04:45:18PM -0600, David Zmick wrote:
>    I have been wondering how to make smalltalk a more "popular" language,
>    because i think it is excellent, and i think it would be good to try to
>    get other people to use it, because, i don't notice to many younger
>    programmers, like myself, using smalltalk, though, i may be wrong.

I am 22, which is younger than everyone else I've asked here.

>    One of
>    the first thing i would think of to promote smalltalk would be writing
>    programs in smalltalk instead of just making smalltalk better, i am not
>    trying to discourage improvement on smalltalk, but if all you are
>    developing is a language for people to continue to develop a language in,
>    it seems like a waste of time.

If it is fun, it is not a waste of time for that person. . But
you are right; it should not be the only direction we pursue. I
really want to push that as the vision for the next release
team.

>    The only program I know about, as in big,
>    large scale programs, written in smalltalk is PetroVR, i may be wrong
>    there to, but i see smalltalk as an excellent development environment and
>    language, but, nothing big is written in it, and it will never grow if the
>    community is focused entirely on making smalltalk better.

There are lots of big seaside projects; the biggest is
dabbledb.com. Croquet is pretty big too.

>    I might be
>    completely wrong, but that is what i have seen, but, i have only really
>    payed attention for a couple of months, and i think it would be good to
>    see some growth in smalltalk's popularity. :)

>

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

On 29-Jan-08, at 3:42 PM, Joshua Gargus wrote:

> The benefits of popularity seem clear.  There would be more smart
> people with more spare time to contribute good ideas and code.
> There would be more jobs and a better chance of making a living
> using the language.  The second benefit would feed into the first,
> and vice-versa.

Well, I agree that smart people contributing to the community would be
a good thing. But popularity doesn't necessarily imply smart people,
it just means *more* people. I think the community we have today is
actually quite good. The "unpopularity" of Smalltalk acts as a filter.
To be a Smalltalker you've got to be smart enough to recognize the
benefits, confident enough to leave the mainstream, and resourceful
enough to overcome the obstacles that working in an "unpopular"
language entails.

If Smalltalk were more popular, I doubt we would
actually get all that many more "smart people" than we have now.

Now, making a living using the language. Popularity would probably
bring more jobs, but it would also bring more programmers to compete
for those jobs. It would probably also lower the average salary of
Smalltalk jobs. That might or might not be a good thing.

> The question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs.  Since the
> benefits seem obvious to me, I'll assume that you're really
> expressing skepticism about whether the benefits outweigh the
> costs.  What do you think the costs are? (I can think of a few, but
> I'm curious about what others think)

I guess there are two costs. One is the effort and sacrifices required
to make Smalltalk popular. For example, we might try creating a Ruby-
on-Rails clone in Smalltalk, in order to take advantage of the current
vogue in web apps. That would be a fair amount of work, presumably
done by people who might otherwise be working on things that benefit
the existing community. Or perhaps Seaside could be "dumbed down" so
it could be marketed to the kind of developer that doesn't like the
"magic" of continuations. That makes Seaside worse for the rest of us.

The other cost is all the noise that would get introduced into the
community. Sure, Java has more libraries than Smalltalk, but most of
them are just crap. All they do is make it harder to find the good
stuff, and diffuse the energy of the community.

In general, I think we'd be better to focus not on popularity, but on
community. Yes, a certain size is required for the community to
function well, but beyond that there are diminishing returns from
further growth. As long as the VM gets maintained, libraries written,
bugs fixed, questions answered, newbies encouraged - as long as the
community is functioning - Smalltalk is sufficiently popular.

Colin

On 29-Jan-08, at 9:48 PM, Laurence Rozier wrote:

> While I don't agree, I also don't see anything inherently wrong or
> bad about this view - to each his own. However, it isn't consistent
> with the original goals of Smalltalk nor the "programming for the
> rest of us" statement currently on the Squeak About page. I know
> there are others who  don't want to see the community expand very
> much and if that is a consensus then the About page ought to be
> changed to reflect it. Although Smalltalk as an SDK is a stretch in
> my view, Croquet makes clear who its audience is - truth in
> advertising. If the Squeak community really doesn't want Squeak to
> be for "everyone" that ought to be clear up front.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that we make the community
into some kind of elitist club where outsiders aren't welcome. I
really like the way this community treats newcomers, and I wouldn't
want to change that. I'm a recent arrival myself!

What I *am* saying is that I don't think we should be trying to
achieve "popularity."

We should put our efforts into developing our
technology and empowering the community.

If that happens to attract
new members, great! If not, that's fine too. The community we have
today is large enough to be successful.

Colin

Well, despite what has been said here we at Pinesoft are (successfully)
devloping commercial applications with Squeak.

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]]On Behalf Of Laurence
Rozier
Sent: 30 January 2008 3:33 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk





On Jan 30, 2008 4:20 AM, Colin Putney <[hidden email]> wrote:


On 29-Jan-08, at 9:48 PM, Laurence Rozier wrote:

> While I don't agree, I also don't see anything inherently wrong or
> bad about this view - to each his own. However, it isn't consistent
> with the original goals of Smalltalk nor the "programming for the
> rest of us" statement currently on the Squeak About page. I know
> there are others who  don't want to see the community expand very
> much and if that is a consensus then the About page ought to be
> changed to reflect it. Although Smalltalk as an SDK is a stretch in
> my view, Croquet makes clear who its audience is - truth in
> advertising. If the Squeak community really doesn't want Squeak to
> be for "everyone" that ought to be clear up front.


Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that we make the community
into some kind of elitist club where outsiders aren't welcome. I
really like the way this community treats newcomers, and I wouldn't
want to change that. I'm a recent arrival myself!

What I *am* saying is that I don't think we should be trying to
achieve "popularity."
Agreed.

We should put our efforts into developing our
technology and empowering the community.
I agree - the question is what is needed to empower a community that
includes "everyone"?

If that happens to attract
new members, great! If not, that's fine too. The community we have
today is large enough to be successful.
I suppose it depends on what the definition of "success" is. The constant
and justified "million euros" comments are a clear reminder that there are
unmed needs. In 2000, I had to hire a Smalltalker for an internet startup. I
interviewed or had conversations a good number of very experienced folk all
of whom really wanted to be making their living from Smalltalk. It was hard
then and still is. Yes Seaside and Croquet are opening doors but do the
math - that's not an abundance of positions  even for the most talented
Squeakers. Getting a Squeak based project funded inside a company(large or
small) is also hard. As a result Smalltalk and Squeak will continue to
survive well into the future, but most of the people attracted to it(along
with their families, friends and co-workers) will not get to use it broadly.
We'll continue to use software that just sucks or is a poor imitation which
is sad because it doesn't have to be that way and for a few short years it
wasn't. There are ways out of the current mess, but people first have to
acknowledge the mess and/or there has to be a significant wave of new
adopters. Then the community has to be willing to make the difficult
tradeoffs needed to climb out of the quicksand. In my view, survival is a
necessary ingredient for success not the goal.

Laurence





Colin

On Jan 30, 2008 12:42 AM, Joshua Gargus <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> What do you
> think the costs are? (I can think of a few, but I'm curious about what
> others think)

Well, as other's have said, languages having huge libraries doesn't
mean they're good.  Of course a good counter argument to that is "who
cares, I can get X done very quickly.  We can always fix the library
later if it matters".

But the thing I would be most worried about is that what would happen
to the *language* if it became popular.  If Squeak became the #1 used
language tomorrow that would mean we get the bulk of the people
programming today.  And the bulk of the people programming today seem
*extremely* adverse to learning new languages or new (better!) ways of
doing things.  Even with the small-ish community we have now, we see
requests to add some silly/useless/redundant feature to the language
that their old language had, every couple of months.

As for the job question:  http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
(especially bullet 16).

On 30-Jan-08, at 2:36 PM, David Zmick wrote:
>
> Thats like the hacker communtity, ive been trying to learn about
> security for some time now, and it is very hard to get in to learn
> about anything if you are not already l337("elite") :)

Believe me David, anyone that claims to be 'l337', isn't and probably
never will be.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- ALOHA OY - Love; greetings; farewell; from such a
pain you should never know

To me one of the issues that we have to attack to make Smalltalk more
popular in the business arena is: isolation.

I mean, currently Smalltalk developments are "isolated" in two ways:

- If you choose an Smalltalk, you can't migrate easily to another one.

The "core" framework is more or less the same for all Smalltalks
(collections, streams, exceptions, SUnit).
But when you start using another things like networking, databases,
UI... porting from one Smalltalk to another still requires a lot of
work.

Another issue on porting are tools for  "source code packages". For
example the code of Aconcagua (the unit framework created at Mercap),
is very portable: it was created on VisualAge, and them ported to work
on GemStone, Squeak and VisualWorks.
Camp Smalltalk Rosseta was used to port the initial version from VAST
to Squeak and VW, but the required work was not trivial, and maintaing
"source code packages" for each Smalltalk flavor is really tedious.

I know that there is a Monticello package loader con VW Public Store,
but having an open source package format with multiple smalltalks in
mind would be nice. (Even more nice would be having an open source
multi smalltalk versioning system... imagine how nice would be if
SqueakSource packages, and VW Public Store packages are accessible
from the same public repository and versioning system).

- The integration with other tools could be really difficult

In VisualWorks you have  tools to integrate an smalltalk application
with the rest of the enterprise: webservices, ActiveX, JNIport.
But in Squeak, no :(
The webservices package seems to be unmaintained, and you have a great
FFI support, but compared to Ruby or Python, the communication with
systems in Java or C# requires a lot of work.
For example, a lot of enterprises  (Banks, travel agencies, etc) uses
JavaEE for the middle tier. But there this is a potential market for
Seaside in the web tier: the framework is superior and more flexible
than JSP, Ruby On Rails or PHP.  But is not easy to communicate your
Seaside front end to the Java/C# backend. You can use and ad-hoc HTTP
or plain socket messages, or buy a license of VW and use WebServices
or RMI. But the immediate cost of this compared to just develop the
web application in Java or JRuby, is difficult to justify.

Also integration from other applications to Smalltalk is difficult (a
nice thing of GNU Smalltalk is that you could use the VM as a library
in C -the people in VW is working in something similar, and I think
that St/X also have something like this).
Thanks to this Python became more popular: Python is used as scripting
language in a lot of games because is really easy to integrate from  C/
C++. (for example in Linux you could make an filesystem driver using
Python and FUSE!)


Well that are to me aspects that we as developers can resolve, and can
have impact on the whole community: with better integration with other
systems, an small consultant could sell a Seaside based solution more
easily. With tools to work on multiple smalltalks I think it would be
less duplicated work, and more shared packages between smalltalk
implementations.

On Jan 30, 2008, at 4:16 AM, Damien Cassou wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Jan 29, 2008 11:45 PM, David Zmick <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> I have been wondering how to make smalltalk a more "popular"
>> language,
>
> I can find different options:
>
> - distribute flyers (http://damien.cassou.free.fr/)
> - present Smalltalk/Squeak/Seaside
> (https://svn.squeak.org/Advertisement/presentations/squeak_jm2l_en/)
> - help people working on the Smalltalk entry point (the dev-images,
> the documentation...)
> - live on #squeak irc and answer questions
> - develop programs with Smalltalk/Seaside and advertise
>
> --
> Damien Cassou
>