Helping other for helping us too

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Apr 17 14:19:41 UTC 2004


hi hans

I imagine that you filled the survey 
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/scripts/SurveyMain.ssp
For the stories, I just listen when I go to conference and I'm 
organizing ESUG so people talk to me.
I read also the cincom digest.

There is also the site of monty where people can list their projects. 
http://www.goodstart.com/

Hans you should also contact the cincom promoting people in germany 
laurent monika and georg heeg


On 17 avr. 04, at 15:41, Hans Nikolaus Beck wrote:

> Hi Stef (and others)
>
> In principle, I agree with you. In my company, I try to give a way for 
> using smalltalk in our software development, and the vwnc with it's 
> *full* power is the best (if not the only) way to get the money from 
> management :-). The reason for this is the "linux effect": I implement 
> things needed in daily work in company in *spare time*,  so that the 
> management could see real things which are complex enough to be a 
> foundation for decisions. This is only possible with a nc version.
>
> On my desk, there are many time bombed tools, some realy interesting, 
> but there is none which I could studied enough in 30 days so that I 
> could say "yes, thats the solution to our problem, give  x thousand 
> EUR please".
>
> I could understand the commercial interest, but as I tried to describe 
> above the NC is supporting the commercial interest, not killing it.
>
> BTW: where do you got information of such success stories ? I VERY 
> interested in information about projects done with Smalltalk, which 
> includes such data like number of machines, duration of the project, 
> budget, reason of decision for smalltalk, time constraints, technical 
> constraints etc...............
>
>
> Greetings
>
>
> Hans
>
> Am 17.04.2004 um 13:46 schrieb stéphane ducasse:
>
>> hi simon
>>
>> I made a ****lot**** of squeak demoes over the last 5 years and I 
>> always see this funny (not fun)
>> smile on the faces of people when I show squeak. "Oh this is 
>> chidlish, this is fun but come on not serious......" To the point I 
>> pay an extreme attention to the way I do demoes now because I do not 
>> want to be clown. Now I can be extremely aggresive with my audience: 
>> "yes this looks really pink and full of color but the VM can be 
>> modified on the fly you know and other stuff like that" so a demo is 
>> not only showing the rotation halos.
>>
>> Now when I start my demo and ask "ok guys how many of you have a AMD 
>> on your machine, raise your hands. Ok this is developed in Smalltalk 
>> you do not know it but there are 400 machines in parallel controlled 
>> by VW and this chain does not stop, cannot stop, and work 24h a day 7 
>> days per week. And you know there are building a new plant for the 
>> new generation and they are really happy with VW"
>>
>> Saying that ezboard one of the biggest web group support in the world 
>> as a cluster of 120 PC serving VW or that UPS tracking system is 
>> based on VW, or that the American Army is using war simulator built 
>> in VW really helps. It would help even better if I could say ok 
>> disney is using squeak in all the game your kids are playing but they 
>> missed that opportunity.
>>
>> So now if you do not understand that VW is cool and that this is the 
>> only important player in the field
>> what can I say? I'm not here to convince you but realise that the 
>> fact that IBM dropped Smalltalk is bad for us even if we have fun 
>> with morph and sound and flashy toys we build the week-end and the 
>> night. Because during the day a lot of squeakers do Java.
>>
>> Sorry to be a bit rude but we should wake up. We are a BIG community 
>> not just a small Squeaking ones. The guys from VW are good they 
>> resisted to the worse period and they deserve respect and help when 
>> needed. We should make Squeak growing and growing and we can move 
>> faster/evolve and be different than VW. I'm the first one to 
>> criticize some of their choice for their namespaces.
>> But we have to pay attention to others and we should not get trapped 
>> in our nice toy because other Smalltalk exist too such as the 
>> excellent Smalltalk/X http://www.exept.de
>>
>> We can influence them and they can influence us. VW now can use 
>> squeak pluging, there will be/is   a port of Seaside in VW. The PDF 
>> framework on Squeak comes from VW.
>>
>>> Just to be contrary.. why do we need a strong an conquering VW, 
>>> again ? In the big picture ?
>> This is my answer but I think that you can just think a bit and find 
>> yourself all kinds of reasons.
>>
>> stef
>>
>>
>
>
>




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