This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Productivity and Cost
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
One of the interesting things to me is how many people will say things like "Yes, Smalltalk is more productive, but...". The next thing you'll get is some statement about how hard it is to find Smalltalkers, or about how the syntax is wrong (what, developers can't learn a new language?). You'll get the same complaints about any niche language - Lisp, Ruby, Python, Scheme - they all get tarred with the same brush.
Heck, the major analyst groups are particularly bad about this - Gartner will admit that Smalltalk is more productive (i.e., will deliver results faster at a lower cost) - and then tell you to use Java or C#. It's always high school in the hallowed halls of Gartner, and all that matters is being close to the "popular" crowd. When you look at the data from SPR (I'm getting the actual tables from SPR; they charge for them now) - you can see hard data backing this up. The tragedy is, this is old news.
Need a more recent example of the productivity? Have a look at all the excitement surrounding continuation based web applications - and then note that none of that is happening in C# or Java (there's some in JavaScript). Why is that? Well, Java and C# - i.e., the mainstream so valued by the analysts - simply doesn't support it. If you want to have a chance of finding the next big thing, you can't find it in the mainstream. If you want a chance to find something truly innovative, you have to be willing to look elsewhere....
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