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.