Klaus D. Witzel schrieb:

> Quote:
> Jonah Group principal consultant Jeremy Chan cannot verify a 
> resurgence in  the use of the Smalltalk object-oriented language as 
> indicated by Georg  Heeg at the recent Smalltalk Solutions Conference, 
> noting that none of his  company's customer requests exhibit a desire 
> for Smalltalk.


 I'm not sure, if Georg Heeg means "new" customers. Perhaps he sees 
reactions
from old customers, who remember their investment into Smalltalk 8 years ago
and these programs are running and runnning ... and now these customers
are updating their application with VW 7.x .

 Another story I heard was, that these old customers realized, that 
money is
short and its much cheaper to enhance their old running applications than
to rewrite it from scratch - not knowing, if this would work.

 And another rumour was, that these "enhancements" are often against
company rules ("we do all with Java in the future") and these investments
are below a magical amount of money, where the local subsidaries of
these companies can do the enhancement investment without querying
the bosses of the IT departments in the main company.

  Another little chance for Smalltalk (again ...) could be a reborn of
dynamically typed languages. I've heard a presentation about what
programming languages are missing today and in the future and one of
the major points was: meta programming facility. This does not mean
reflection as available in .NET or Java - but the powerful systems of
LISP and Smalltalk. Signals in this direction comes from some IBM
research laboratories and from the .net group from Microsoft.

 Marten

-- 
Marten Feldtmann - Germany - Software Development
Information regarding VA Smalltalk and DMS-system
"MSK - Mien Schrievkrom" at: www.schrievkrom.de