On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 20:09, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>
> Liam, our problem here is at least in part one of weariness. If you were to read back in the mail list archives you'd find ... many, perhaps hundreds?... of times when somebody has asked us collectively to explain "why Smalltalk?" Sometimes it  is genuinely curious people that want to understand, that listen and then join the collective, err, I mean the team.
>
> Often, so very often, it is somebody wanting a fight over some crypto-religious point. Bizarrely, quite a lot of people seem to be threatened by the idea of a not-dead-text-in-files world. A looong time ago we suffered a prolonged attack of "it must be changed to be just like Visual BASIC or it will die!!!" demands. Dan Ingalls even responded by making an alternate syntax setup that allowed code to be written and presented as a BASIC-like text.

That is impressive!

> We have long suffered from drive-by idiocy telling us that an interpreted language with all that wasteful trash of structure and garbage collection and message sending cannot possibly work and will always be slow and nobody will ever understand it and you can't write applications in it and real programmers use XXXXX (where XXXXX is flavour of the month on some gitidiot/slashdot type site) and by the way you people have bad breath. Presenting facts does essentially nothing to stop this.

Well, I do sympathise. I have been digging into language and OS design
for more than a decade now, and I keep finding impressive, inspiring
new developments that get shouted down by _hoi polloi_ because they
are different and not like what people are used to.

> If you want to see some decent quality Smalltalk evangelism and explanation, try quora.com and look for articles by people like 'Mr Smalltalk', Richard Eng. He's had to pretty much retire from this effort for medical reasons but he put a *lot* of effort into presenting things. Obviously, never look at any other parts of Quora - the site that is an existence proof that not only are there, in fact, stupid questions but that there is a near infinite supply of people wanting to ask them again and again and again.

Ha! I have been banned from Quora. My crime was using a fake name. My
account name was "Liam Proven", my actual, real, legal name since
birth and what it says on my passport.

"Proven" is a buzzword on Quora, clearly.

> The couple of tweets you pointed to seem to me to be excellent examples of people that have no interest at all in understanding or learning anything new. It's just another case of "somebody is wrong on the internet" and I fear most of us here are a bit worn out with that.

ISWYM. I had hoped for some rebuttal that I could send back, but I see
that that would be a big ask when everyone's tired of the same sort of
heckling. :'(

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