Helping other for helping us too

Hans Nikolaus Beck HNBeck at t-online.de
Sat Apr 17 13:41:41 UTC 2004


Hi Stef (and others)

In principle, I agree with you. In my company, I try to give a way for 
using smalltalk in our software development, and the vwnc with it's 
*full* power is the best (if not the only) way to get the money from 
management :-). The reason for this is the "linux effect": I implement 
things needed in daily work in company in *spare time*,  so that the 
management could see real things which are complex enough to be a 
foundation for decisions. This is only possible with a nc version.

On my desk, there are many time bombed tools, some realy interesting, 
but there is none which I could studied enough in 30 days so that I 
could say "yes, thats the solution to our problem, give  x thousand EUR 
please".

I could understand the commercial interest, but as I tried to describe 
above the NC is supporting the commercial interest, not killing it.

BTW: where do you got information of such success stories ? I VERY 
interested in information about projects done with Smalltalk, which 
includes such data like number of machines, duration of the project, 
budget, reason of decision for smalltalk, time constraints, technical 
constraints etc...............


Greetings


Hans

Am 17.04.2004 um 13:46 schrieb stéphane ducasse:

> hi simon
>
> I made a ****lot**** of squeak demoes over the last 5 years and I 
> always see this funny (not fun)
> smile on the faces of people when I show squeak. "Oh this is chidlish, 
> this is fun but come on not serious......" To the point I pay an 
> extreme attention to the way I do demoes now because I do not want to 
> be clown. Now I can be extremely aggresive with my audience: "yes this 
> looks really pink and full of color but the VM can be modified on the 
> fly you know and other stuff like that" so a demo is not only showing 
> the rotation halos.
>
> Now when I start my demo and ask "ok guys how many of you have a AMD 
> on your machine, raise your hands. Ok this is developed in Smalltalk 
> you do not know it but there are 400 machines in parallel controlled 
> by VW and this chain does not stop, cannot stop, and work 24h a day 7 
> days per week. And you know there are building a new plant for the new 
> generation and they are really happy with VW"
>
> Saying that ezboard one of the biggest web group support in the world 
> as a cluster of 120 PC serving VW or that UPS tracking system is based 
> on VW, or that the American Army is using war simulator built in VW 
> really helps. It would help even better if I could say ok disney is 
> using squeak in all the game your kids are playing but they missed 
> that opportunity.
>
> So now if you do not understand that VW is cool and that this is the 
> only important player in the field
> what can I say? I'm not here to convince you but realise that the fact 
> that IBM dropped Smalltalk is bad for us even if we have fun with 
> morph and sound and flashy toys we build the week-end and the night. 
> Because during the day a lot of squeakers do Java.
>
> Sorry to be a bit rude but we should wake up. We are a BIG community 
> not just a small Squeaking ones. The guys from VW are good they 
> resisted to the worse period and they deserve respect and help when 
> needed. We should make Squeak growing and growing and we can move 
> faster/evolve and be different than VW. I'm the first one to criticize 
> some of their choice for their namespaces.
> But we have to pay attention to others and we should not get trapped 
> in our nice toy because other Smalltalk exist too such as the 
> excellent Smalltalk/X http://www.exept.de
>
> We can influence them and they can influence us. VW now can use squeak 
> pluging, there will be/is   a port of Seaside in VW. The PDF framework 
> on Squeak comes from VW.
>
>> Just to be contrary.. why do we need a strong an conquering VW, again 
>> ? In the big picture ?
> This is my answer but I think that you can just think a bit and find 
> yourself all kinds of reasons.
>
> stef
>
>




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