I'm pretty "new" in my abilities, but I have found a TERRIFIC product
written in VisualWorks thanks to networking with all you Smalltalk-y people.
 We are working to develop a data collection and reporting tool in a
healthcare environment using this system that already existed and was
designed specifically to be able to bring together "fragments" of
information from multiple sources of data through conflict resolution rules,
etc... into a single "Object Model" (set of classes).

Anyway...what I am doing is another topic--but it IS the back story for the
following tale.

Because we are "developing" something together, and it is "Smalltalk" (even
though it's not, but because I found it by EXPLORING Smalltalk, it's
"branded"), one of our Board Members (a former programmer) is extremely
leery.

In his words, he is "extremely prejudiced" against Smalltalk, even though he
used it during a big project "back in the day."  He calls it a "quirky,
unusual" language that you can do "great and powerful things" with.  The
"Father of real object oriented programming," but only a "niche" language
that small groups of bright people use to go of and accomplish amazing
things with.  But, because the business is full of "ordinary" people, he
thinks you would never be able to find anyone to work with the code you have
written as a business when your Smalltalk developers leave for other
pursuits.

Hence, he suggests that I look to other development environments such as
Java Beans or Eclipse!

All this, and we won't even be "programming," but using a "meta-programming"
environment designed SPECIFICALLY to solve the KIND of problem we have (how
lucky was that?).  Sure, it's got Smalltalk at it's core, and yes, you can
drop down into Smalltalk when you need to, but...yeesh....

Just thought you'd like an anecdotal tale of the feelings that are out there
as of a few days ago!

Rob

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Mark Volkmann <mark at ociweb.com> wrote:

> I don't have a lot of experience with Smalltalk yet, but I really love what
> I've seen so far.
>
> I'm curious what experienced Smalltalkers see as some of the reasons why it
> doesn't attract more attention. I understand the issues with Smalltalk in
> the past related to license costs and performance, but those have been
> addressed now. Have you tried to convince someone to consider Smalltalk and
> failed to convince them? Why do you think they rejected it? What
> improvements could be made to current Smalltalk environments, especially
> Squeak, that might sway them?
>
> For me the biggest issue has been trying to run my code from outside
> Squeak. This includes running Squeak headless to do something script-like
> and configuring a GUI application to run in a way that doesn't require the
> user to know they are running Squeak. Both of these are supposedly possible,
> but very difficult to get right.
>
> ---
> Mark Volkmann
>
>
>
>
>
>
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