[Smalltalk-vn] Growing the Smalltalk-vn community

[Yang Ha Nguyen]

  On 08/02/2010 12:09 PM, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> we are now 13 people registered on the Smalltalk-vn mailing-list.
>
> What have been done in the previous months since the creation of the
> mailing-list in June 2008:
> - June 2008: Creation of the Smalltalk-vn mailing list
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/smalltalk-vn
> - Jan 2009: Smalltalk flyer in vietnamese, thanks to Nguyen Hong Son :
> http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st/seaside/pier/Smalltalk/flyers
> - April 2009: Presentation of Smalltalk at BarCamp Hanoi 2009:
> http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/smalltalk-bar-camp-hanoi-2009
> - September 2009: Presentation of EToys in Ha Noi:
> http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/an-instrument-whose-music-is-ideas-2036947 
>
> - May 2010: Talk at IFI/Ha Noi about Pharo Smalltalk:
> http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/pharo-an-innovative-and-opensource-smalltalk 
>
> - June 2010: OLPC Vietnam dev meetinghttp://olpc.vn/
> - July 2010: Magic-Words project with a group of vietnamese students
> http://code.google.com/p/magic-words/
>
> I put everything on this web page:
> http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Smalltalk_in_Vietnam
> You could add your name in the list if you want (just ask me for
> login/password).
>
> This is quite a small community at the moment and i'm looking for more
> ideas to have more people joining us.
> Maybe we could organize a Smalltalk meeting every week or every two
> weeks: just to talk, do some peer programming and do some nice
> demonstrations.
> I'm also happy to do a talk in your company/institution if there
> enough people interested.
>
> BTW, do'nt shy to talk here and express your opinons. You can even
> speak in Vietnamese if you prefer ;^-)
> Regards,

Hi all,

There are many practically difficulties about growing the Smalltalk 
community in Vietnam.  The biggest problem, I believe, is that there 
very few people know about Smalltalk and its programming paradigm.  In 
Vietnam, students learn Pascal from secondary school and high school, 
even in university, they are taught mostly VB, C/C++, Java and .NET 
languages (VB.NET, C# for almost all situations) which are at different 
paradigm from Smalltalk.  Thus, the vital point to grow our Smalltalk-VN 
community is to raise people's awareness about the Smalltalk language, 
its implementations, what it can do, and how things are done in 
Smalltalk.  Personally, that's what I'm trying to do, little by little.  
To do it, we need to make a clear and flexible plan.

Another problem we are having is that, well, our community is small but 
we have not yet known each other.  So when one has some problems while 
learning and doing programming with Smalltalk, s/he is shy to get help, 
to make it a topic for everyone to discuss about it.  I like Serge's 
idea about having a weekly or biweekly meeting.  Like he said, we could 
get to know each other, talk about Smalltalk and its development 
direction, do some demonstrations and presentations, discuss, make some 
tutorials (since there are few of tutorials compared to other "popular" 
languages) and improve them, ...  It's all good for us, it does not cost 
a lot of time, and it's fun!

I'd love to hear ideas from you guys.  If you are afraid of long 
writing, it's okay.  Just drop a line about the time and we could have 
an offline meeting.

Best regards,

-- 
Yang Nguyen
Web log:http://proginno.wordpress.com/
Life is a hack

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