Dan, how would you reconcile the need for immediate usefulness and the assumption that "we are busy, and we don't have time to download a new environment, figure out a new browser, learn a new graphics system", with Alan's assertion that technology these days is flawed because it requires little effort? ================ A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous dissatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the dissatisfaction from self worth--otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results. ================ In this context, what does it mean to be useful if it requires no effort? Is this an issue of being able to quickly differentiate ourselves from others because, absent a flashy presentation, we feel we (and our work) are indistinguishable from others (and their work)? Not that we have control over that issue, but I think it would be important to acknowledge that motivation explicitly if it is really there. On 10/30/2010 1:48 PM, Dan Ingalls wrote:
Good People -
Adoption of a language, like any other adoption, is generally a function of the needs and wants of the audience, and the strengths and weaknesses of the substance being promoted. For better or worse, this function can be significantly biased at the outset by marketing. As technologists, we repeatedly underestimate the importance of marketing and, even when we know we need to promote our systems, we fail because the skills of marketing are not simply technical skills.
Who are our users? We all have our own answer for this. I'll answer for myself so that I can be articulate -- these are the users I would like to attract, or who I feel would find our system valuable if they used it... Kids at play - ie people 8-16 who are doing fun things Kids at work - ie students 8-20 who are doing more serious things like math (including computer science), physics, graphics, music, etc Computer professionals at play - most of us Computer professionals at work - most of us
About the computing context The computing context has changed a lot over the years. It used to be personal computers running Mac, Windows or Unix, and it used to be simple functions like text editing and experiments with media. Now it is mostly running in "the" browser, and communicating over the web. A couple of things have remained key values, though: The ability to create new content simply and directly, and the ability to pull together existing content flexibly. By "content" I mean both media and functions (services). The ability to assemble existing content has been the greatest strength and weakness of Smalltalk over the years. For internal content, Smalltalk is unmatched in its ability to make every extension, whether music, graphics, or a financial model, as natural as a built-in language feature. For external content, however, Smalltalk has historically faltered at the edges of its monolithic system.
What do the users need and want? The ability to create new content simply and directly, the ability to assemble existing content flexibly, and the ability to share any results easily.
What is important for marketing An old quote of Alan's is still relevant here: "Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." Smalltalk has always suffered from two main barriers: installation and integration. Once you have it installed, and if you don't need to access anything outside, it is unmatched in its ability to make simple things simply, and to achieve complex goals as well. Within its self-contained context, its image model is perfect for saving, restoring, and sharing work between sessions, between machines, and between users.
In the world of today, people expect any new thing of interest to spring to life in their browser. They expect it to look attractive, cool, powerful; anything but geeky... http://emberapp.com/ http://www.thecssawards.com/ http://cssmania.com/galleries/ You want this, too, right? So we can use "we" in place of "they". We expect it to be immediately useful. For a computer language, this means you can immediately try out some expressions and make something happen. We want this. We are busy, and we don't have time to download a new environment, figure out a new browser, learn a new graphics system, right? We expect it to be incremental - do some work, save it, pick it up later - we expect the comforts of Smalltalk-style development. We expect it to be sharable - do something and send it to someone. It's what we do with email, photos and videos. We probably want it to be self-sharing, how about your workspace in your facebook page, and tweets about each cool new thing.
These are the things that Gilad and I are grappling with, and I think everyone on this list probably thinks the same way from time to time. Gilad is trying to fix some of the modularity problems in Smalltalk and exploit some of its greatest strengths, while figuring out how to host it in today's (or tomorrow's) browsers. And I've been playing around with what's possible using JavaScript directly, but with some Smalltalk comforts like a nice browser, work in a live editable environment, and save your project state as a web page.
To return to Gilad's post, [my interpretation: We don't take the time and effort to explore new systems, and we don't take the time and effort to make our own systems easy for others to explore]
I am well aware that this is not a terribly actionable observation. It's just the way it is. What one can do is identify weaknesses and work hard at fixing them, and hope that some people will find it worthwhile to become truly involved.
I feel the same way. But if you feel the same way from time to time, perhaps you should start a movement to do something similar, or see how you could contribute to NewSpeak or the Lively Kernel; not to abandon Smalltalk but to experiment with how to carry *its goals* and *your desires* forward.
Nothing is holding us back
- D
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