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@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@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
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