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

by Stéphane Ducasse

Hi andrew > 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. Why is it not more alive now than in 1998? I think that the community is in a much better shape now. > 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. So what is the idea? Get stuck with a language that will never change and has no vision because some people do not have the vision for their implementation? If this is what you propose we can just close the shop now. > 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. What have you been doing for Smalltalk around you in the past years? You know just drinking a beer with colleagues and have a show me your projects is a start. I created the swiss smalltalk user groups, pushed esug, support students, wrote books, .... so of course not everybody should do the same but you can ask yourselves what you want and how to help. > The Smalltalk community should have worked to keep the .NET interface alive, > but it was allowed to die at a version 1. I do not know the story. I cannot compile any .net code on any of my machine. Now of course microsoft and java are big player. > 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. Sad. VA was nearly killed by IBM and they played it well not selling their smalltalk part to google. We will see how they will play it in the future. Now we cannot move moutains. If people with power do not play the way the community benefits from it than this is like that. Now microsoft has a lot of money and we do not have it. > I've lost hope, but wish Smalltalk the best.

March 25, 2011

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

by Stéphane Ducasse

Steven this is fun that you shoot on us while you were never able to come and present your products at ESUG while I'm sure that it would have helped the community. Now I like all the talking here, but how many are we to do something for others (I mean others than our little business). Stef On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:03 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 > 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 > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list(a)lists.esug.org > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

March 25, 2011

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

by Tim Mackinnon

> This takes me back to my initial question, what can we do to: > a) get more Smalltalkers to use a Smalltalk based blog system ... Guys - this has been a very interesting thread. I'll put my hand up and say I feel guilty not using a Smalltalk based blog/website. I briefly considered it a few years ago when I was setting up a personal site but it was just so easy to pay $10/month and have a 1 click install of Joomla - which I played with for 1 hour, bought a nice template (another hour) and then published some content. Having said all this, for a Cms it's crazily hard to link to your own content (but it has an easy wysiwyg js editor that my partner can use to add content for me). But reading this, I would love to start again and would like a preconfigufed starting point to get my toes wet. Something setup with no obvious security flaws and a nice template (maybe 3) that can take a bit of load if needed. If there was this, it would be a no brainer (I have resolved to watch the mentioned screencast and give it a spin taking some notes). In this world I would then shame all my friends who know any smalltalk to take the "blogtalk" challenge! Of course in this world the further draw for me would be that it would be easy to then customise things with components that it's easy for me to write (particularly with our great environment). The icing on the cake would be an easy system to download/upload these components like you can in firefox (eg a gallery of them). For the latter point - I was quite taken by Avi's demos where they could do clever things with data using the power of smalltalk. To me, with a gemstone database backing things, plugins could do very powerful things like wrap all your hyperlinks in a tracker link etc. Or back out cleanly if you uninstall them. I notice it's quite nice on an iPhone that's it's easy (well could be better but...) to download things and try them and remove them if you don't like them. I think this would make the "blogtalk" challenge quite palletable. I think we are close to this world, as many pieces are there but we would need to get the same energy around it as with the core Pharo team. I've read lots of moans on this thread - and should we or shouldn't we, but I think it would be a lovely project even if it was just for us (but I bet it would attract others too). Tim

March 23, 2011

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

by Niall Ross

Dear Andy, >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. ... I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support. > As regards this email chain, I mostly agree - it has become long without achieving much focus. (But perhaps one or more of the positive suggestions will turn into something.) Next year's conference is in Edinburgh and will have, amongst other things, - a stronger VA presence (you are aware that Instantiations has hired and has increased its focus on Smalltalk) - an increased focus on pre-conference advertising to make the outside world aware of us, get more newbies / ex-Smalltalkers in How well it will work, I don't know, but we're certainly going to try. While my summary is less harsh than yours, I was aware of the features at the Barcelona conference that you noticed. - Were you at Brest or Amsterdam? - In these difficult times, the Smalltalk activities of the major vendors, far from collapsing, are in fact doing well. That is worth noting. Meanwhile, whether you come or not, I hope you like the poster for the ESUG 2011 conference, available in hi-res JPEG and PDF at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.pdf and can display it, if only for the picture of Edinburgh, which I think is pretty good. Yours faithfully Niall Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

March 23, 2011

Please display the poster for ESUG 2011 wherever developers gather

by Niall Ross

The poster for the ESUG 2011 conference is available in hi-res JPEG and PDF at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.pdf It names some of Smalltalk's technical and commercial achievements. It will (I hope) be a draw for Smalltalkers and also for some Rubyists (it mentions MagLev), for general dynamic language people, and for some general developers interested in something with this history of achievement, past and present (it also notes there will be intro workshops and tutorials for interested non-Smalltalkers). Please display where you can in companies, universities, user groups, etc. - wherever developers congregate. Thanks Niall Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

March 23, 2011

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

by Sean Allen

2011/3/22 Göran Krampe <goran(a)krampe.se>: > Hi all! > > I agree with Julian in all his points (thus no quoting!) but just wanted to > say one more thing in this thread: > > Although it is fun and engaging to talk about "we should do X", and I really > don't want to suppress that, it almost never ends up being the driving force > for someone to actually do X. > > 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. > > Just my 2 öre. > +1 although it helps if people want to coordinate on 'doing X'.

March 23, 2011

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