Shows a total ignorance of how management thinks.

Java is about 1/10 to 1/5 as productive as Smalltalk.

 From the manger's perspective, he wants to climb the corporate  
ladder.  To do this, he must become more important than he is.  He  
could hire Steve the wizard Smalltalker to write his system and get  
it done in a few months.  Steve can do it.  He's pricey but from a  
productivity perspective, he's worth it.

But when promotion time comes - manager guy can only say "I have one  
employee - Steve" and he gets very little respect as a manager.  How  
hard can it be to manage one guy?

For the timeframe - he could hire 5 Java guys - make more code (that  
does the same thing) and he gets to say to his peers that he manages  
a team of 5 developers.  Each developer costs less than Steve - so it  
looks like he is getting a bargain in two ways.  Which sounds better  
to his boss who is judging him on his management skills?  He manages  
Steve.  Or he manages a team of 5?  Which one will get him promoted?

Extra bonus reason - Steve can get hit by a bus.  Big risk!  A Java  
developer can also get hit by a bus - but if that happens it is much  
less likely to impact the project critically.  So manager guy feels  
better about that too.  Steve is hard to replace - Java people are a  
dime a dozen and only have to be 1/5 as good.

Smalltalk loses because it is TOO productive.  It frightens the  
manager and doesn't make him look powerful and important.  It  
marginalizes him instead.

FWIW, I also worked as a dev manager at some large companies and  
believe me - this is the thought process.


On Aug 12, 2007, at 1:36 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:

> Another one from blogosfere. For our rethinking ...
>
> http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/99
>
> A lack of productivity is killing Smalltalk.
>
> I heard today that the development of Dolphin Smalltalk has been  
> discontinued. Although it isn’t a product I used or was familiar  
> with, I have been involved with a number of Smalltalk-based  
> development efforts in the past. While it was somewhat popular in  
> the late 1980s and early 1990s, the commercial usage of Smalltalk  
> has declined significantly since then.
>
> Slava Pestov suggests how poor implementations are leading to the  
> downfall of Smalltalk. I would tend to agree, to some extent. Most  
> Smalltalk implementations really don’t compare to a development  
> platform like Java, or even what Microsoft has put together with C#  
> and .NET.
>
> However, I would tend to think that the main reason why Smalltalk  
> has started to really fall out of favor is that it doesn’t bring  
> the level of productivity that it used to, relative to other  
> technologies. Back in the early 1990s, a lot of enterprise-grade  
> software was written using C or C++. For developing complex  
> business applications, Smalltalk often did offer a very significant  
> productivity boost to developers, even if the runtime performance  
> of the applications suffered somewhat. Being at a higher-level, it  
> allowed business rules and concepts to be more easily and  
> effectively represented in the software itself.
>
> But that started to change by the mid-1990s. Java arose, and  
> offered many of the benefits that Smalltalk had been offering.  
> That’s not to say that Java, as a language, is comparable to  
> Smalltalk. In many ways it’s quite inferior, even over a decade  
> after its initial release. But it was more familiar to those  
> developers who’d come from the world of C and C++, while also  
> offering OO functionality and garbage collection similar enough to  
> that of Smalltalk.
>
> I’ve worked with several excellent Smalltalk developers in the  
> past. A talented, experienced professional can do wonders with  
> Smalltalk. Unfortunately for them, Java and its vast array of  
> classes, class libraries and frameworks have brought a similar  
> level of productivity to only average developers. So if these  
> average developers can churn out an adequate software product at a  
> lower cost than the Smalltalk expert, as has often become the case,  
> then the business will flow towards the Java developers.
>
> Unless the Smalltalk developers bring something to the party that  
> drastically increases their productivity (or their software’s  
> productivity) over that put out by Java developers, they won’t have  
> a real chance at survival.
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Janko Mivšek
> AIDA/Web
> Smalltalk Web Application Server
> http://www.aidaweb.si
>