[Newbee] Salutations

Ron Teitelbaum Ron at USMedRec.com
Wed Oct 5 15:56:59 UTC 2005


Göran and Cees,

Just to be clear my comments about Java were in no way a comparison of the
language but instead a comparison of the level of acceptance.  I'm not sure
if the acceptance is a result of the business proposition, but it would seem
to be the case.

I would not want to change the process for business but instead we need to
focus the process to gain greater acceptance from the business community.
It was really amazing to me that the work we did in smalltalk was seen as
risky, whereas the Java code out there, as bad as it was, was seen as
leading edge and viable.  The large numbers of Java programmers, untrained
and unqualified logo spinners as they were, seem to also hold sway over the
business consultants.  

Attracting business support and new developers and communicating these
aspects along with the value proposition that we know exists in what we do
should be a priority.  

Stability is good, we should try to figure out more reasons that we are
perceived as risky and address those issues too.  We should also be trying
to incorporate easy to use business extensions, or ready to modify example
applications.  We should focus on new developments and how they will change
computing, like Croquet.  We could support me toos like .net and SOAP (I
know it's awful).  We should expand as a platform for popular media.  We
should be capitalizing on the techy changes in our space like blogs and
lists and readers and netcasts.  Why shouldn't a smalltalk vm be on every
browser how do we add the right business tools to help web developers?  We
should consider what we need to do to gain a wider audience, large numbers
of users, and wider acceptance.  People should know that using smalltalk
means stability and real application power.

In my opinion Java is not more stable or mainstream or reliable then
smalltalk it just has more support. 

I said I would keep quiet I guess I didn't.  Sorry about that.  I'm a firm
believer in Smalltalk it is terrific fun.  It's a wonderful language and
very powerful.  It's time we change things and raise the acceptance level of
this language to the level that it deservers.  

Thanks for listening,

Ron





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