Hi,


Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com> hat am 22. März 2011 um 09:59 geschrieben:

>
> Norbert Hartl wrote:
> >
> > ... 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.

 

Agreed. You can build many great things in Smalltalk, but most of them can be built in other environments as well. It may cost more or be harder, but it's possible.

 

> > 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.
> >
>
> Agree, Smalltalk needs applications that stand out, something that attracts
> people's attention ... and yes, a great user friendly blog/cms was only "an"
> idea :)

 

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.

 

But if we manage to make our Smalltalk environments a nice place to stay at for programmers, we can probably attract more Smalltalkers. It's not enough to have the very best of languages when we use tools that look&feel as if they were frozen for 20 years. Smalltalk is a great, flexible, dynamic environment that enables productivity and high quality, but it doesn't lokk as if it was.

 

As long as Smalltalk IDEs are looking dated, lack functionality like modern widgets and toolbars, palettes etc, we can do what we want, it will turn people away. We need a better rich client platform than Eclipse, Xcode or VisualStudio and we need full support of modern GUI standards. No matter how much better a Smalltalk debugger is than a Eclipse's or Xcode's debugger, most developers won't give it a chance to prove it, because it's somewhat strange or at least different. There's literally no Smalltalk that can build a Mac App that looks native. There are no Smalltalks in which I could (easily) build a GUI like Word or Photoshop without doing a lot of hand-coding (or hacking) on the widgetry.

 

So my idea would be a platform inspired by Eclipse's rich client platform, which both helps improve the Smalltalk IDE itself, make it extensible and at the same time enables modern looking GUI apps with little effort. Just imaginge the power of Eclipse RCP without hundreds of XML files and adaptors, just plain Smalltalk code. If it looks & feels good, it doesn't even have to be "native". SWT isn't really, neither is Word, Photoshop or iTunes.


Somebody wrote in this thread (was it Eliot?): if the Smalltalk tool is great, great applications will follow. He's absolutely right.

Joachim