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</head><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">I don't think it is a
naive belief. There are actually differences between languages, and they
do matter in the success of projects. I think the widespread disdain
for Java in the development world at large is partly a recognition of
this.<br>
<br>
This is just a bit of apocryphal and vaguely-remembered evidence, but I
remember a discussion at a conference a few years back, and I think the
participants were Alistair Cockburn and Martin Fowler. They were talking
about "Design Starts" and successful completions of projects and the
ratio between them as a metric. And were talking about various factors,
but mentioned that in Smalltalk, though the number of starts was always
low, the ratio of design starts to completions had been extraordinarily
high.<br>
<br>
Equally apocryphal, I'm fond of saying that we have some large customers
who are in the process of converting their applications from Smalltalk
to another technology. Some of them have been doing so for many, many
years.<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote style="border: 0px none;"
cite="mid:CAKsvBp9cnAtzU0JuZAk7dsed1RDY8y6Oab+xmTqJR8bTCs1nhw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
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<div style="margin-left:40px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:peter.hunsberger@gmail.com" style="color:#2057EF
!important;text-decoration:none !important;">Peter Hunsberger</a><br><font
color="#888888">31 January, 2012 8:54 AM</font></div>
<br>
<div style="color:#888888;margin-left:40px;" __pbrmquotes="true"
class="__pbConvBody"><br>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:<div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now onto the main question posed here....</div><div><br></div><div><span
style="">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.</span><br style="">
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></div>Peter Hunsberger<br>
<br><br><br>
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<div style="margin-left:40px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:laurent.laffont@gmail.com" style="color:#2057EF
!important;text-decoration:none !important;">laurent laffont</a><br><font
color="#888888">29 January, 2012 3:37 AM</font></div>
<br>
<div style="color:#888888;margin-left:40px;" __pbrmquotes="true"
class="__pbConvBody"><br>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 :)<div><br></div><div>Laurent<br><br><br></div>
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<div style="margin-left:40px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:janko.mivsek@eranova.si" style="color:#2057EF
!important;text-decoration:none !important;">Janko Mivšek</a><br><font
color="#888888">28 January, 2012 10:46 AM</font></div>
<br>
<div style="color:#888888;margin-left:40px;" __pbrmquotes="true"
class="__pbConvBody"><br><div>Hi guys,<br><br>Ralph Johnson in his InfoQ
interview made an interesting observation:<br><br>2:55 minute:
"Smalltalk made an fundamental error ... image ... you can<br>build
something with 4-5 people what 50 people can build in Java, but if<br>you
take 200 people in Java ... it is really designed for small systems<br>...
"<br><br>Are we because of the image really destined for relatively
small<br>projects and small systems (of Java 50 people project size)?<br><br>Are
we really not able to scale to bigger projects/systems because of that?<br><br>Ok,
there are few exceptions of course (JPMorgan, OOCL, ..), but still...<br><br>[1]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop">http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop</a><br><br>Best
regards<br>Janko<br><br><br></div></div>
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