<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 29, 2008 7:51 PM, Colin Putney <<a href="mailto:cputney@wiresong.ca">cputney@wiresong.ca</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>On 29-Jan-08, at 3:42 PM, Joshua Gargus wrote:<br><br>> The benefits of popularity seem clear. There would be more smart<br>> people with more spare time to contribute good ideas and code.<br>
> There would be more jobs and a better chance of making a living<br>> using the language. The second benefit would feed into the first,<br>> and vice-versa.<br><br></div>Well, I agree that smart people contributing to the community would be<br>
a good thing. But popularity doesn't necessarily imply smart people,<br>it just means *more* people. I think the community we have today is<br>actually quite good. The "unpopularity" of Smalltalk acts as a filter.<br>
To be a Smalltalker you've got to be smart enough to recognize the<br>benefits, confident enough to leave the mainstream, and resourceful<br>enough to overcome the obstacles that working in an "unpopular"<br>
language entails.</blockquote><div><br>While I don't agree, I also don't see anything inherently wrong or bad about this view - to each his own. However, it isn't consistent with the original goals of Smalltalk nor the "programming for the rest of us" statement currently on the Squeak About page. I know there are others who don't want to see the community expand very much and if that is a consensus then the About page ought to be changed to reflect it. Although Smalltalk as an SDK is a stretch in my view, Croquet makes clear who its audience is - truth in advertising. If the Squeak community really doesn't want Squeak to be for "everyone" that ought to be clear up front.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br><br>Laurence<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> If Smalltalk were more popular, I doubt we would<br>actually get all that many more "smart people" than we have now.<br>
<br>Now, making a living using the language. Popularity would probably<br>bring more jobs, but it would also bring more programmers to compete<br>for those jobs. It would probably also lower the average salary of<br>Smalltalk jobs. That might or might not be a good thing.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>> The question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Since the<br>> benefits seem obvious to me, I'll assume that you're really<br>> expressing skepticism about whether the benefits outweigh the<br>
> costs. What do you think the costs are? (I can think of a few, but<br>> I'm curious about what others think)<br><br><br></div>I guess there are two costs. One is the effort and sacrifices required<br>to make Smalltalk popular. For example, we might try creating a Ruby-<br>
on-Rails clone in Smalltalk, in order to take advantage of the current<br>vogue in web apps. That would be a fair amount of work, presumably<br>done by people who might otherwise be working on things that benefit<br>the existing community. Or perhaps Seaside could be "dumbed down" so<br>
it could be marketed to the kind of developer that doesn't like the<br>"magic" of continuations. That makes Seaside worse for the rest of us.<br><br>The other cost is all the noise that would get introduced into the<br>
community. Sure, Java has more libraries than Smalltalk, but most of<br>them are just crap. All they do is make it harder to find the good<br>stuff, and diffuse the energy of the community.<br><br>In general, I think we'd be better to focus not on popularity, but on<br>
community. Yes, a certain size is required for the community to<br>function well, but beyond that there are diminishing returns from<br>further growth. As long as the VM gets maintained, libraries written,<br>bugs fixed, questions answered, newbies encouraged - as long as the<br>
community is functioning - Smalltalk is sufficiently popular.<br><font color="#888888"><br>Colin<br><br></font></blockquote></div><br>