thanks Ralph for your words,

>Smalltalk is a wonderful language both for teaching
> and for research.
>I've always wondered why it did so poorly in universities.

I think the reason is related with univerities and their
 relation with formal methods insetead of results&costs
 of application.

It is easy to have inmediate results with languages...
 read a book and you have learn enough to
 continue doing the same, with another syntax.
Laguages suffers of premature obsolescence, then it is a
 very good tool to feel diferent and make people to be
 always investing in "personal training".

> The class library is not modularized, so it is hard
> for newcomers to see what to learn first.

One of the difficult topics to understand is
 that classes are not classes (because they coevolve)...

>Smalltalk is pretty easy to learn if you are pair programming
> with an expert whose main goal is for you to learn,
> not to build a system.  It is hard to learn from a book
> and from experimentation.

It is a very important point that reveals
 smalltalk as propagable by a parent-child
 mechanism, like benign religions.
Viral propagation are the mechanism observed
 in Java and any other popular language.

This diference is very important to understand
 why it is not necessary for smalltalk to have a huge
 number of adopters to survive, and other effects
 ovservables in human relations in smalltalk
 communities.

>So, if you want to help Smalltalk spread, sit down
> and program with a newbie!

I really agree and promote the same attitude,
 because it is is important (imho) to smalltalker's
 sanity.

best,
Ale.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ralph Johnson" <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 8:20 AM
Subject: Re: Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence? {Dr. Dobb's Journal(05/06/06)
Chan, Jeremy}


People keep mentioning technical aspects of Smalltalk as being the
ones that will make people want to use it.  Technologists are
interested in technology, so this is not surprising.  However, people
are more important than technology.  If Smalltalk is going to have a
resurgence, the people who know and love Smalltalk will have to make
it happen.  It isn't going to happen automatically.  Jeremy Chan is
right to emphasize people problems like "no big company is pushing
it".

Every tool has its stengths and weaknesses.  To make Small prosper,
people should use it where it works and not use it where it doesn't
work.  Smalltalk is fantastic in small groups of motivated
programmers.  It is not so good in large groups with high turnover.
People seem to get excited about large Smalltalk projects, and to long
for the days of ten years ago when there were 100 person projects.  In
my opinion, those projects were never run well, and were probably all
a mistake.  Many of them were successful in the sense of bringing a
product to market, but all the ones I saw could have been done faster
and cheaper with a smaller team.

Smalltalk fans ought to go start companies.  Smalltalk has lots of
advantages in a startup, where it is important to get something
running quickly and where compatibility with existing systems is not
so important.  It doesn't work as well in a big company, where it is
iimportant to play it safe and there are existing standards and lots
of  existing systems.

Smalltalk is a wonderful language both for teaching and for research.
I've always wondered why it did so poorly in universities.  I think
that one of the reasons is that it is hard to learn.  There are too
many things about Smalltalk that are new.  The language is easy, but
the class libraries are large, and the programming environment is
different from what people are used to.  People are not used to "live
objects" and do not know how to take advantage of them.  The class
library is not modularized, so it is hard for newcomers to see what to
learn first.

Smalltalk is pretty easy to learn if you are pair programming with an
expert whose main goal is for you to learn, not to build a system.  It
is hard to learn from a book and from experimentation.  I taught
myself Smalltalk 20 years ago and have since taught it to a thousand
or so students.  I tell my students that they all will learn Smalltalk
faster than I did, because they will have a teacher.  This is not 100%
true, since some students didn't try very hard.  But it is pretty easy
to learn when you have a teacher who knows Smalltalk well.  One of the
problems with getting it used in schools is that somebody has to teach
the teachers.

So, if you want to help Smalltalk spread, sit down and program with a
newbie!

-Ralph Johnson