This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Blaine on Smalltalk's rep
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.
Blaine explains why many Java developers think Smalltalk is old and out of date:
So, why do the java developers think their tools are ahead of ours? Eclipse looks mighty pretty and it has a lot of great features. But, pound for pound, we have the same features and more. We have a live world to play in. Eclipse is nothing more than a painting of the world. We are the real thing! I can change the object inspector in the IDE and no shut down! Any change to Eclipse and I have to shutdown and restart. So, why are java tools considered better? The only thing I can think of is the looks. At work, we use VisualAge and well, VisualAge looks old. I'm trying my best to tell them not to judge a book by its cover and there's a reason a lot of people think it's cool. But, they have this notion that us Smalltalkers are just old technology guys hanging onto our past for dear life. It saddens me that they see me this way. I love new technology and I'm constantly studying new languages. But, so far, the one I am most productive is Smalltalk. Period. End Of Story. Ruby and Lisp are great too, but I can still code faster in ST. I would still pick any dynamic language over java/C# any day of the week.
So, here's the rallying call. How do we make Smalltalk not seem old. I think despite it's age, it's still far ahead of the game in a lot of areas and where we lack, we can quickly close the gap. Let's get rid of this stigma that Smalltalk is old technology. We are the future NOW!
Well, might I suggest that you show them a Smalltalk environment that is still under development - Cincom Smalltalk, or Dolphin. I can't speak to Dolphin's recent improvements, but For CST have a look over here. There's been a lot of work done, and there's a lot of work being done now. We have a development roadmap that covers the next few years - so you'll continue to see a lot of cool new things. If you want to impress the developers, show them what's being done, and what will be done - not was was done quite some time ago.
Previous Topic
