March 2011 - Esug-list - lists.esug.org

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Dale Henrichs

Andy, I understand what you are saying and your predicament is not a happy one, other than the fact that at the moment you are still able to earn your living working in Smalltalk:)... From my perspective there are two markets for Smalltalk ... the old legacy market and the new web-driven market. These two markets are very different and have completely different needs ... I think that the hope that the Enterprise customers will buy into Smalltalk the way that they once did is not very bright. It is difficult to walk into a corporation through the front door with the intent to compete head to head with Java. In my opinion the hope is to be had by following the route that Ruby has pioneered: sneak in the back door through small projects in the enterprise or small startups that become fantastic successes ... Small, back room enterprise projects and startups value programmer productivity and Smalltalk can win big in the productivity game ... ... with caveats, and in my opinion, Smalltalk still has some work to do be really competitive in that game and the work needs to be done on several fronts... I don't think that there is a single silver bullet that will catapult Smalltalk back into the conversation, but I think that the combined efforts of the whole community will do the job... Diversity in this environment is a good thing ... it means that different things are changing at different rates for different reasons and when a "really good idea" shows up in one Smalltalk dialect, it will show up in the others which then strengthens everyone .... ...Dale On 03/22/2011 06:13 AM, Andrew J Lindquist wrote: > After this email, none of you will have to put up with me, because I've already removed myself from the ESUG list. > > I find this email chain, like the barcelona conference, extremely sad. I went to the conference hoping that I could tell my employer that Smalltalk is alive and strong. The conference like this email shows it is weak and divided. Adding more flavors of Smalltalk that are not 100% compatible with what already exists only dilutes the Smalltalk world. Creating email chains, like this one, that drags in people like me, longing to see progress, but only emphasizing the fractures in the Smalltalk community, want to cry. > > The Smalltalk community should have worked to keep the .NET interface alive, but it was allowed to die at a version 1. Because of incompatible Smalltalk flavors, I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support. The result is that my employer is moving all new development to. C# .NET using MVC, Fluent NHibernate, S#arp Architecture, and jQuery. I just came back from a .NET conference that showed a strong unified community. Many of them are still trying to understand OOD, but they are learning and supporting each other. > > Out of six Smalltalk developers here, I am the last one dedicated to Smalltalk development. When there is no more Smalltalk to be done, my programming days will end. > > I've lost hope, but wish Smalltalk the best. > > Andy > > > On Mar 22, 2011, at 6:35 AM, "Norbert Hartl"<norbert(a)hartl.name> wrote: > >> >> Am 22.03.2011 um 10:23 schrieb Julian Fitzell: >> >>> Hi Norbert, >>> >>> I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how >>> passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to >>> talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible. >>> >> Ok, it seems we just have different definitions of passion. >> >>> Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing >>> is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever >>> they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests >>> to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to >>> discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on >>> ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever >>> first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve >>> some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. >>> "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a >>> very very strange sentiment... >>> >> It is also quite obvious that you need to talk if you are not doing it alone (or by definition if you like that better). So I didn't mean it is forbidden to talk about marketing. And to be honest if you say "...are not quite sure what to do..." and you find "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?" a strange sentiment than I'm totally out of bussiness explaining it. >> >>> Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to >>> thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore >>> benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is >>> *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being >>> discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly >>> popular. Do you think it will? >>> >> Yes, I do. I don't believe there will be a single killer app that rejuvenates the investment in smalltalk. A lot of effort is to convince other people. And for that you often need to prove that you can do "that" also. I think it is good to have a portfolio of applications that you just can show. That is a language people understand that are not technical experienced (which we all agree is the majority). >> My assumption here is that we are not only talking about end-user products but about doing services for customers which build end-user products. >> >>> I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: >>> * there are many established players already in the market, with >>> mindshare and a big headstart >>> * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the >>> existing platforms >>> * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be >>> using an uncommon language >>> * our deployment story is still poor >>> * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying >>> programming language >>> * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at >>> least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area >>> where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing >>> languages >>> >> That sounds like a quick market/risk analysis and would be the explanation why you would not invest money in this idea. But do you have an alternative what we _can_ do? >> If I would be a startup company I would agree completely with your reasoning. You need some "unique selling point" "something outstanding" to be able to be succesful on the market. >> >> My point is that you need enablers. Why I'm defending the CMS idea is not that I think the CMS to have is the final goal. But if we are talking about CMSes we are talking about web technologies. Integration of multiple services in a single html page is not that easy (making it _one_ application). If you can live with iframes and same domain origin policy than it is not a problem. If not you need to integrate things more tight. A CMS is just this placeholder for me that enables certain tasks to do with smalltalk in that case web technologies. >> >>> The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS >>> in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The >>> Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with >>> little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have >>> been largely targeting the wrong people. >>> >> I don't understand the last sentence. >> >> Norbert >> >>> (By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools >>> sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer >>> tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of >>> Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, >>> integrate, and innovate...) >>> >>> Julian >>> >>> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl<norbert(a)hartl.name> wrote: >>>> This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea! >>>> >>>> Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow. >>>> >>>> Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily. >>>> >>>> So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead. >>>> >>>> ranting end. >>>> >>>> Norbert >>>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Esug-list mailing list >>> Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org >>> http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Esug-list mailing list >> Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org >> http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Marcus Denker

On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:10 PM, Marcus Denker wrote: > > >> 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" > > This was added at around 14h today because we want to add a new page with information. > >> I configured the page to not be shown in the menu. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Marcus Denker

On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:04 PM, Steven Kelly wrote: > It's great that people are willing to talk about this, and some are doing things too. Admit it though: most of this discussion is programmers talking about marketing, which is as useful as marketers talking about programming. I'm in my 20th year of Smalltalk, so I've seen this a fair few times. My 2c: I'm fairly certain that the only way Smalltalk could achieve major success is by dying and being reborn with a new name. > > If anyone has a minute (and access rights!), the ESUG pages could do with some love: > 1) they crashed yesterday, and have often slowed to a crawl Yes, and we restarted it within the fasted possible time. > 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" This was added at around 14h today because we want to add a new page with information. > 3) The search box does nothing yes, this should be fixed. I did not yet find the energy for that. > 4) On IE8, there are Javascript errors. All pages have "Ajax is not defined", and many have some "idX is not defined" errors (for various X) > We should fix that... but then, you are the first to notice. > Believe it or not, those are the kinds of things that register with outsiders when they check out Smalltalk, in particular if they're considering using it to build things on the web. Of course I understand this is all done as volunteer work, and I appreciate the effort people have put into it. I'm just pointing out the facts and providing a bug report. > I personally think that the website is already far better then it used to be. And even though it might not be apparent, it was a lot of work. Especially moving all the old conferences into the Pier wiki... lots of work. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Steven Kelly

It's great that people are willing to talk about this, and some are doing things too. Admit it though: most of this discussion is programmers talking about marketing, which is as useful as marketers talking about programming. I'm in my 20th year of Smalltalk, so I've seen this a fair few times. My 2c: I'm fairly certain that the only way Smalltalk could achieve major success is by dying and being reborn with a new name. If anyone has a minute (and access rights!), the ESUG pages could do with some love: 1) they crashed yesterday, and have often slowed to a crawl 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" 3) The search box does nothing 4) On IE8, there are Javascript errors. All pages have "Ajax is not defined", and many have some "idX is not defined" errors (for various X) Believe it or not, those are the kinds of things that register with outsiders when they check out Smalltalk, in particular if they're considering using it to build things on the web. Of course I understand this is all done as volunteer work, and I appreciate the effort people have put into it. I'm just pointing out the facts and providing a bug report. All the best, Steve -- Steven Kelly, Ph.D. Co-President and CTO, MetaCase Tel.: +358 14 641 000 ext. 21 Fax: +358 420 648 606 Cell: +358 40 7331 286 Web: www.metacase.com <http://www.metacase.com/> Blog: www.metacase.com/blogs/stevek/blogView Email: steven.kelly(a)metacase.com SD TIMES 100 Winner 2007 & 2008 MetaCase Recognized as Software Development Leader and Innovator <http://www.metacase.com/news/SDTimes100-2008.html>

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Andrew J Lindquist

After this email, none of you will have to put up with me, because I've already removed myself from the ESUG list. I find this email chain, like the barcelona conference, extremely sad. I went to the conference hoping that I could tell my employer that Smalltalk is alive and strong. The conference like this email shows it is weak and divided. Adding more flavors of Smalltalk that are not 100% compatible with what already exists only dilutes the Smalltalk world. Creating email chains, like this one, that drags in people like me, longing to see progress, but only emphasizing the fractures in the Smalltalk community, want to cry. The Smalltalk community should have worked to keep the .NET interface alive, but it was allowed to die at a version 1. Because of incompatible Smalltalk flavors, I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support. The result is that my employer is moving all new development to. C# .NET using MVC, Fluent NHibernate, S#arp Architecture, and jQuery. I just came back from a .NET conference that showed a strong unified community. Many of them are still trying to understand OOD, but they are learning and supporting each other. Out of six Smalltalk developers here, I am the last one dedicated to Smalltalk development. When there is no more Smalltalk to be done, my programming days will end. I've lost hope, but wish Smalltalk the best. Andy On Mar 22, 2011, at 6:35 AM, "Norbert Hartl" <norbert(a)hartl.name> wrote: > > Am 22.03.2011 um 10:23 schrieb Julian Fitzell: > >> Hi Norbert, >> >> I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how >> passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to >> talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible. >> > Ok, it seems we just have different definitions of passion. > >> Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing >> is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever >> they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests >> to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to >> discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on >> ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever >> first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve >> some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. >> "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a >> very very strange sentiment... >> > It is also quite obvious that you need to talk if you are not doing it alone (or by definition if you like that better). So I didn't mean it is forbidden to talk about marketing. And to be honest if you say "...are not quite sure what to do..." and you find "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?" a strange sentiment than I'm totally out of bussiness explaining it. > >> Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to >> thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore >> benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is >> *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being >> discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly >> popular. Do you think it will? >> > Yes, I do. I don't believe there will be a single killer app that rejuvenates the investment in smalltalk. A lot of effort is to convince other people. And for that you often need to prove that you can do "that" also. I think it is good to have a portfolio of applications that you just can show. That is a language people understand that are not technical experienced (which we all agree is the majority). > My assumption here is that we are not only talking about end-user products but about doing services for customers which build end-user products. > >> I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: >> * there are many established players already in the market, with >> mindshare and a big headstart >> * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the >> existing platforms >> * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be >> using an uncommon language >> * our deployment story is still poor >> * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying >> programming language >> * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at >> least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area >> where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing >> languages >> > That sounds like a quick market/risk analysis and would be the explanation why you would not invest money in this idea. But do you have an alternative what we _can_ do? > If I would be a startup company I would agree completely with your reasoning. You need some "unique selling point" "something outstanding" to be able to be succesful on the market. > > My point is that you need enablers. Why I'm defending the CMS idea is not that I think the CMS to have is the final goal. But if we are talking about CMSes we are talking about web technologies. Integration of multiple services in a single html page is not that easy (making it _one_ application). If you can live with iframes and same domain origin policy than it is not a problem. If not you need to integrate things more tight. A CMS is just this placeholder for me that enables certain tasks to do with smalltalk in that case web technologies. > >> The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS >> in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The >> Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with >> little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have >> been largely targeting the wrong people. >> > I don't understand the last sentence. > > Norbert > >> (By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools >> sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer >> tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of >> Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, >> integrate, and innovate...) >> >> Julian >> >> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name> wrote: >>> This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea! >>> >>> Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow. >>> >>> Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily. >>> >>> So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead. >>> >>> ranting end. >>> >>> Norbert >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Esug-list mailing list >> Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org >> http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org > > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Reza Razavi

Hi Göran, all, At 12:04 22/03/2011, Göran Krampe wrote: >something *I* want to do (and has already started doing) Building on the Smalltalk Community achievements since several decades, and my own Smalltalk-related work since 1992: 1) I've conducted in 2008 and 2009 a quite extensive study of the elderly requirements like preventing and managing impairments, improving quality of life, mobility, nutrition, medication, organization, communication, etc. These are socially, economically and technically challenging enough to motivate calling in Smalltalk technologies. Specifically, the elderly requirements are characterized by quality attributes like runtime adaptation to changing needs and conditions, affordability, and privacy. 2) I've elaborated and funded a project for developing novel Smalltalk-based solutions that address those requirements. 3) As part of that project, I've already implemented an extension to Pier and Seaside for developing Online Programmable CMSs (OP-CMS) [1]. To the best of my knowledge, no other CMS solution comes currently with end-user programmability. Although, when addressing the elderly requirements, CMS is necessary to dynamically adapt the content of the web server, and end-user programmability to adapt its functionality. So, it appears to me that We, as a Community, have there a significant competitive advantage, which is currently largely underexploited. 4) Now, I'm in the process of adding social networking facilities (as social networking is known as a core component of elderly-related solutions). 5) As a next step, I want to create a network of professional Seaside/Smalltalk "web service" providers. In effect, runtime adaptation of the server functionality in OP-CMSs is based on online service composition. A "service" may be any piece of code accessible for invocation from a Seaside server, including Seaside components themselves and standard Web-Services from Amazon, etc. "My" software platform provides online service composition and interpretation facilities (together with content management and social networking). Elderly people need individualized solutions. Additionally, their needs change alongside the ageing process. So, to address worldwide the elderly changing needs, hundred of thousands of individualized services will be needed. This appears to me a concrete and substantial market for Smalltalk solutions. The end-user-friendliness issue of Pier interfaces will be addressed as a byproduct of that effort. What do you think about this product-oriented and Smalltalk-based research, development, and innovation project? Would anybody be interested in joining efforts to create and sustain a network of professional Seaside/Smalltalk "web service" providers, and eventually technology developers for Smalltalk-based elderly solutions (in line with what was OLPC for kids)? Regards, Reza Razavi [1] <http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app>http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app [2] http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/iwst-2010 [3] <http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/pppo-2011>http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/pppo-2011

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Norbert Hartl

Am 22.03.2011 um 10:23 schrieb Julian Fitzell: > Hi Norbert, > > I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how > passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to > talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible. > Ok, it seems we just have different definitions of passion. > Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing > is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever > they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests > to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to > discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on > ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever > first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve > some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. > "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a > very very strange sentiment... > It is also quite obvious that you need to talk if you are not doing it alone (or by definition if you like that better). So I didn't mean it is forbidden to talk about marketing. And to be honest if you say "...are not quite sure what to do..." and you find "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?" a strange sentiment than I'm totally out of bussiness explaining it. > Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to > thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore > benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is > *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being > discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly > popular. Do you think it will? > Yes, I do. I don't believe there will be a single killer app that rejuvenates the investment in smalltalk. A lot of effort is to convince other people. And for that you often need to prove that you can do "that" also. I think it is good to have a portfolio of applications that you just can show. That is a language people understand that are not technical experienced (which we all agree is the majority). My assumption here is that we are not only talking about end-user products but about doing services for customers which build end-user products. > I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: > * there are many established players already in the market, with > mindshare and a big headstart > * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the > existing platforms > * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be > using an uncommon language > * our deployment story is still poor > * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying > programming language > * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at > least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area > where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing > languages > That sounds like a quick market/risk analysis and would be the explanation why you would not invest money in this idea. But do you have an alternative what we _can_ do? If I would be a startup company I would agree completely with your reasoning. You need some "unique selling point" "something outstanding" to be able to be succesful on the market. My point is that you need enablers. Why I'm defending the CMS idea is not that I think the CMS to have is the final goal. But if we are talking about CMSes we are talking about web technologies. Integration of multiple services in a single html page is not that easy (making it _one_ application). If you can live with iframes and same domain origin policy than it is not a problem. If not you need to integrate things more tight. A CMS is just this placeholder for me that enables certain tasks to do with smalltalk in that case web technologies. > The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS > in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The > Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with > little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have > been largely targeting the wrong people. > I don't understand the last sentence. Norbert > (By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools > sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer > tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of > Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, > integrate, and innovate...) > > Julian > > On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl <norbert(a)hartl.name> wrote: >> This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea! >> >> Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow. >> >> Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily. >> >> So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead. >> >> ranting end. >> >> Norbert >> > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Janko Mivšek

Hi guys, My opinion is, that we are good in CMS *as a framework*, but I doubt we will ever be in CMS for end users. CMS as a framework means, that you are building your customized solutions on top of it, and that CMS functionality is usually only a tiny part of a whole solution. And we are good in complex things, so having a Smalltalk CMS in this case is a good thing. That's at least how Scribo CMS is used and how it was actually born. Scribo is namely an open sourced part of bigger commercial offering. I prepared some classical public sites with Scribo as well and for me as Smalltalker it was easy. But immediately when I started to explain Scribo to others , I came to conclusion, that a lot more needs to be done for Scribo to become a more end-user friendly. To invest a time and resources in that, is it worth? That's my question too. But so far I'm happy to use Scribo as a framework. Janko On 22. 03. 2011 11:27, Geert Claes wrote: > > Joachim Tuchel wrote: >> >> ... >> I'm afraid the idea of having to provide a killer app that will show the >> world how cool Smalltalk is will not work. If the app is great, nobody >> will ask: What's it made with? My blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, and I >> must admit I neither have an idea nor care what language it's written in. >> My time is too limited to care. >> > > I disagree on this one. There are a lot of similarities between > Smallthought Systems/DabbleDB/Seaside/Squeak and 37Signals/Rails/Ruby where > both have somehow kick-started a wider community who did care. > > > Joachim Tuchel wrote: >> >> But if we manage to make our Smalltalk environments a nice place to stay >> at for programmers, we can probably attract more Smalltalkers. >> > > Agree ... -- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by Göran Krampe

Hi all! On 03/22/2011 11:20 AM, Niall Ross wrote: > Dear Goran et al., > I agree with Julian's points and yours. > > Göran Krampe wrote: > >> IMHO a more exciting discussion can start if someone says "I want to >> do X" and then see what people think of it and if they want to join in >> and so on. > > So let's return the thread to the three proposals actually made so far > IIRC. > > The first two are complementary - we could do both: > > 1) GSoC Smalltalk project in the area of CMS: needs Pier-capable mentor(s). But now you are writing "we"... is the above something *you* want to do? And besides it is not happening for this year, ESUG did not get GSoC approved this year. Personally I am in agreement with those that have a hard time seeing the real benefits of a "yet another" CMS project. > 2) ESUG workshop/tutorial in Edinburgh in August: [SNIP of description] > Someone needs to say, "I'll teach it". Which is what I am saying... :) > If (1) is designed to prepare the way for (2), great. Ideally, a mentor > for (1) would run the tutorial/workshop (2). Again, would *you* like to create a tutorial? Or this workshop? > The third idea reasied in the thread was an alternative > > 3) Make it easier to write Smalltalk plugins for some popular CMS. > > If someone _has_ written a Smalltalk plugins to existing CMS, or has > knowledge of what that would require, they should write it up (or talk > about it at ESUG, of course :-) ). "they should"... > Yours faithfully > Niall Ross Sorry Niall for my "negging", don't mean harm. :) But just as an example of something *I* want to do (and has already started doing) is to create a good bridge between Erlang and Pharo/Squeak: http://www.squeaksource.com/JoesServer.html *That* might just be interesting to attract new people, well, in fact I have already attracted Joe Armstrong (!) with it - it was he who wanted me to write it in the first place, and Erlang is HOT these days. regards, Göran

March 22, 2011

Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

by James Robertson

I try to link to all the interesting Smalltalk news I see - if I miss something (and I did catch this one: http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?entry=3471489914) please ping me - I have a Google chat back widget right on my blog for that purpose :) On Mar 22, 2011, at 6:52 AM, Davorin Rusevljan wrote: > Well folks, > > Strategic discussions are nice and welcome, but related to subject of > this thread, Nick Ager recently posted link to his very nice blog post > with included tutorial how to host Seaside app on EC2. > > Now, raise your hands, who has tweeted, buzzed, commented or linked to > this blog post. > > Davorin Rusevljan > http://www.cloud208.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org James Robertson http://www.jarober.com jarober(a)gmail.com

March 22, 2011