Posted by horrido on Aug 13, 2016; 4:47pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Mea-Culpa-tp4800840p4910913.html

hernanmd wrote

I am not that convinced Smalltalk should be popular. Surely any smalltalker
could find easily (more) job offers, that would be the only determinant
factor because we need desperately more Smalltalk positions. But popularity
has many drawbacks.... some smalltalkers are afraid to competition, and we
all read the StackOverflow 'popular' questions...

One of the chief reasons I would like Smalltalk to be more popular is to spur the expansion of the Pharo (Smalltalk) ecosystem, i.e., domain-specific class libraries. For example, I'm interested in A.I. and machine learning. This involves a great deal of statistical and numerical computing, an area where Pharo (Smalltalk) is not particularly strong. Python, on the other hand, has fabulous support for statistical and numerical computing, which frankly makes me very envious. The reason why Python has this is because of its vast user base, i.e., its popularity.

There simply aren't enough Smalltalkers interested in statistical and numerical computing to develop such libraries.