Thanks Dennis for this detailed feedback. It's important to keep the community informed. On 29 oct. 2010, at 05:41, Dennis Schetinin wrote:
We should be more open. We should find a way to start some cooperative projects with other societies/languages. [...] In general, it looks like making Smalltalk more open should be our priority, and this is one of the few ways to enhance prestige of Smalltalk among developers.
I fully agree. There are multiple directions to go. -Applications : We should develop cool applications that target domains that interest users (e.g. mobile applications, web). The look and feel/ user experience is important to have some impact. A recent really cool example is the Event Planning System developed by the belgian company Inceptive. We need to advertise more such applications to the outside of the community. The on-line videos and slides, blogs and the awards are made for this. Still we need more advertisements in places where we can -GUI : This is coupled with the previous item. We need native widgets. Smalltalk developers should be able to applications that comply with the appearance of other applications. Projects such as MARS (Smalltalk software with Mac OS X widgets) is an example. -Programming environments : I love the Smalltalk IDE. Still, many developers don't want to change their programming habit. May be not from the beginning. We should be able to develop Smalltalk in an text editor. This was done in GNU Smalltalk and there is also the CORAL initiative. The effort need to be continued. -Standard/Mainstream protocols, libraries, and infrastructures. We need to provide a bridge to all important pieces of software (e.g. OpenGL). Web frameworks such as Seaside, Aida are definitely a great step in this direction. -Documentation : Both on-line and paper articles and books. Code examples are important. People new to Smalltalk should quickly find some code to copy/paste and test. To sum up, there are already different actions. Still, we need to do more. If you have ideas share them with us. Spending a little of your time in one of these actions would be beneficial to everyone. Noury