This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Using Smalltalk 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. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I ran across Gary Short's points on Smalltalk usage yesterday - he makes some valid observations:

As I've said before, I learned to program in Smalltalk and it remains my favourite programming environment. So, having said that, why do I earn my living programming in a Microsoft environment?

Well the answer's in the question really - it's because I want to be able to earn a living. Here in the UK there's a well known website called Jobserve that has job postings for different IT jobs, (among other things). A simple search for Smalltalk this morning yielded just 13 hits, UK wide, for the last 7 days. A similar search for .Net yielded over 1500 hits.

Yes, that's a problem - and one the vendors - like Cincom - need to help address. At the same time, some of the effort has to drop back to developers who say that Smalltalk is their favorite language. I don't expect developers to "go to the mat" to bring Smalltalk into a shop - far from it. On the other hand, I would expect them to at least bring it up, and ask that Smalltalk be evaluated when new projects come up. Not all the heavy lifting can be done from this end...