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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Can software development go on in the developed world?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Georg Heeg discusses the idea - can we keep doing high value development in the West? Why are people looking at offshoring?
Cheaper
What are the disadvantages? Typically, need to be very specific with your specs. Run the risk of having high skilled people (who can afford high value goods) be unemployed. Georg relates the experience of the textile industry in Germany in the 60's - the work moved further offshore, with production in Germany moving "upscale" - higher quality, luxury goods stayed, while lower quality commodity goods went. How does this translate to software?
Need to develop and adapt software very efficiently
Need to remain customer oriented
Software industry in Germany lost 80k positions (10 percent) in the last year. Those jobs will not be back - they are commodity jobs that left permanently. We need to create new jobs to replace the lost ones. What does that mean - don't work at the low level - think like an end user. The amusing thing? These next slides are actually old - Georg used them to introduce OO to developers as far back as 15-20 years ago. In other words - the values we have been preaching in the Smalltalk community are the ones that developers need to stay in business.
History - Smalltalk-72 at Xerox PARC. The goal? To create the DynaBook (finally starting to get close with PDA's and Tablets). Then Smalltalk-80. First published in Byte Magazine in 1981. This is the technical base of VisualWorks (and Squeak) - in fact, everything that continuations make possible was invented in this system - and the supposed "modern" systems (Java, C#) - still can't do it. Commercialized at PP in the late 80's, Large projects started in the early 90's, IBM got in the game, many Smalltalk books appeared. Then Java appeared and PPS made many bad choices. In 1996-1999 - many of these large projects went into production - and most end users liked what they got. Cincom took over VW and stabilized VW and OST. Starting in 2003, things started to turn around. New Smalltalk users, a change in the business (.NET), new Smalltalk books are being published. Alan Kay received a few awards, C'T magazine (Germany) started a Smalltalk series, sold 380,000 copies.
"Smalltalk is a modeling language" (Adele Goldberg). There's a lot of FUD pushed out about Smalltalk - "The farmer will not eat what he does not know about". Now, Smalltalk is different. However, you won't stand above the competition merely by "keeping up with the Joneses". To "get" Smalltalk you have to unlearn a lot of the baggage from other languages - it's "too simple". Smalltalk enables things like Seaside - the productivity is just higher. So is software development still feasible in the developed world? Yes, but only if you move up the productivity food chain. Finishes with an invitation - to ESUG in Germany.
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