[squeak-dev] Fwd: [vwnc] Smalltalk for small projects only?

Janko Mivšek janko.mivsek at eranova.si
Thu Feb 2 11:48:26 UTC 2012


-------- Prvotno sporočilo --------
Datum: 	Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:54:58 -0600
Od: 	Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger at gmail.com>


With all due respect to the experience of everyone here, people really
need to give up on this naive belief that Smalltalk development is any
more efficient than development in any other language.  The simple fact
is that within the Smalltalk community a large portion of the developers
have been using the tools for a long time and are very good at using
them. Throw them at another environment and they are not as efficient.
 However, if you take new developers and throw them at a Smalltalk
project it takes longer to get them up to speed than throwing them at a
Java project simply because of the fact that Smalltalk is not
as ubiquitous. I switched to Java back when IBM dropped Smalltalk, so
I've seen both sides of this issue for a long time, so let me related
some anecdotal experience:

I'm currently working on a Smalltalk project that has about about 50 man
years of effort in it over 10 years.  Prior to this I worked on a Java
and XSLt project that had about the same effort over the same period.
 Both have web based GUI's with a fair amount of JavaScript and the
usual HTML crud and use a relational DB back end (SQL server and Oracle
respectively). The Smalltalk project has had a mix of very experienced
Smalltalk developers and inexperienced ones.  The Java project was
mainly junior and intermediate experience devs. I'd say the overall
architecture and design was about equivalent; very different, but
equally well done and comprehensive. The projects are very similar in
concept and execution.  The Java project had about twice as many
function points (some pretty major) implemented and four times as many
use cases supported at the point I switched to the Smalltalk project.
 For the most part this has little to do with the language itself.
 Rather, it is mainly, the supporting infrastructure that one is able to
draw on in Java projects and this includes Eclipse, Git, etc.  Open
Source projects also played a big part of this, in the Java world one
can pull in large chunks of functionality at very low cost (eg. XSLt 2.0
processors and pipelines, Spring, Hadoop, you name it) that are just not
quite matched in the Smalltalk world.  You can often get close, but it
seems that there is always something missing, if only because the teams
supporting the Smalltalk projects are often much smaller and just can't
quite keep up with the every changing specs and requirements.

Bottom line, don't kid yourself that there is any inherent advantage in
using Smalltalk development over any other language.  It is faster for
experienced devs in small projects, but if you've got to pull a team
together from scratch for some medium to large complexity enterprise
scale project it is probably not going to fair as well.

Now onto the main question posed here....

I have also worked on a successful 200 man year project (C and C++ in
this case), which broke down to a little less than 100 people over a
little more than 2 years. This was in the telecom world and involved
many main frame billing interfaces and switching equipment interfaces,
all very mission critical. In this case about 60% of the team was heads
down developers. The rest of it was dedicated testers, tech writers,
business analysts, project managers and managers.  Here again the
supporting infrastructure played an important role.  Business analysts
could write up use cases that got stored in a repository (a proprietary
system) that could be used to generate test case stubs and documentation
stubs.  The development team tracked progress and bug reports in the
same repository and source code version control was tied to the
repository. End user documentation was stored in the repository and
version controlled. It was simple to know what was going on anywhere in
the project and to know where the problems were and what code did what
and to see the entire life cycle of any portion of the code base from
customer requirement to final deliverable.  I know of no
support infrastructure that even comes close in the Smalltalk world and
would consider it madness to even consider taking on such a project
using Smalltalk.

Peter Hunsberger


On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 2:37 AM, laurent laffont
<laurent.laffont at gmail.com <mailto:laurent.laffont at gmail.com>> wrote:

    200 developers on a project ? Scaring ..... They should use another
    technology than Java to go under 50 developers. They will save a lot
    of money :)

    Laurent


    2012/1/28 Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek at eranova.si
    <mailto:janko.mivsek at eranova.si>>

        Hi guys,

        Ralph Johnson in his InfoQ interview made an interesting
        observation:

        2:55 minute: "Smalltalk made an fundamental error ... image ...
        you can
        build something with 4-5 people what 50 people can build in
        Java, but if
        you take 200 people in Java ... it is really designed for small
        systems
        ...  "

        Are we because of the image really destined for relatively small
        projects and small systems (of Java 50 people project size)?

        Are we really not able to scale to bigger projects/systems
        because of that?

        Ok, there are few exceptions of course (JPMorgan, OOCL, ..), but
        still...

        [1] http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop

        Best regards
        Janko


        --
        Janko Mivšek
        Aida/Web
        Smalltalk Web Application Server
        http://www.aidaweb.si

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