Dear community,

I am a silent follower of this list. Now, I feel urged to speak up not on a technical, but a community matter.

Every village deserves it's fool. And a wise man does not feed the troll (i did, and doing it right now, sorry). But if this fool is about to take over a considerable amount of public control, the community has to stand up against it. So, I put this to you:

I frequently research on Smalltalk-related topics (computer scientist, try to devote time to open source dev next to my small enterprise). And more and more, I notice that Google search results show very much on top of the result list contributions by a self-appointed "Mr. Smalltalk" aka R.K.Eng. who excels at SEO and flooding social media.

While self-initiatives are a thriving force for open communities, in this case: 

* one individual is hoging credit and applause, without ever having commited a single line of code, putting himself into focus (without having any profound knowledge; to the contrary: he shows a deep ignorance towards "our" and other languages, throwing around dubious advertisment slogans), 

* ...is throwing around with wrong claims (pulling off any potentially interested developer),

* ...is starting pointless flame wars against other programming languages (again: detrimental to our community)

* ...is doing SEO to make Google show his own results before FOSS community or sciences pages.

* ...is getting traction (and money) for his own ends (publicity for the self-appointed "Mr. Smalltalk")

* ...denies community leadership by merit (Pharo core developers do know, what they have created and where they want to go in the future, and which audience we should target, they don't need a clueless person telling them to "get into TIOBE index", just for example)

* is claiming credit for the work, others have done, fostering his own publicity (not the interests of Pharo/VisualWorks etc).

Here is the Medium thread that made me write this mail to you all.

the bottom line of our tedious flame war in a screenshot:

<img src="blob:geary:///e4dc11fd-555f-4341-a0bc-cf7d9325d0b7">

PS: a side note on Javascript (with lower S). wether you love or hate this quirky lovechild of Lisp and Self/Smalltalk, telling JS developers they are stupid and that they should abandon powerful Vue.js, for example, in favor of Amber Smalltalk [cudos to Amber devs! great thing!]) is utterly stupid! Every professional Javascript developer, who is trying Smalltalk the first time, because he/she has read in a post of "Mr. Smalltalk", that it is better, will instantly dismiss Smalltalk and be disappointed. I love Smalltalk (certainly more than JS), but it is detrimental, to throw around with these wrong claims (which in the end are only a self-serving, ego-centric, attention-greedy campaign to promote "Mr. Smalltalk" himself, a total newbie, who claims credit for the work of others).

My suggestion: This community is open and inclusive. But we should clarify, that if a single individual repeatedly goes against those, who do the actual work, claims credits, insults people, then this person is not fit to be part of this community. It sheds a very bad light onto us. --> If R.K. Eng cannot respect community structure and decisions, we should exclude him officially and publicly take distance from this person.

Thank you for your attention.

Michael Zeder