Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon • Hacker News Board

Re: Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon

#11

Post by louiscyphre » Thu, Feb 13, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

xkriva11 wrote: post #8

theamk wrote: post #4

I think of the big problems with Smalltalk is how bad the marketing is. There are few posts which get brought up over and over, and they claim the things that are clearly false ("It can be learned in its entirety within 15 minutes!") or misleading (the one productivity study which is by now decades old.. the claim that it has "simple syntax"). I'd like to encourage Smalltalk advocates to write more "from the trenches…

Sorry, all these articles are from a single person with the messianic syndrome who named himself "Mr Smalltalk". He absolutely rejects any complaints about his activities (he repeatedly told us that we do not understand marketing) and he will never be able to write something more solid because he actually is not a Smalltalk programmer and does not know it well. He is making a really bad service.

How well does one need to know Smalltalk before they can promote it? I'm a Smalltalk newbie; I've only been using Smalltalk on and off for the past few years. But I absolutely love it!

So I'm telling all my friends and colleagues to give Smalltalk a try. Does that invalidate my efforts?

Re: Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon

#12

Post by xkriva11 » Thu, Feb 13, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

louiscyphre wrote: post #10

xkriva11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, all these articles are from a single person with the messianic syndrome who named himself "Mr Smalltalk". He absolutely rejects any complaints about his activities (he repeatedly told us that we do not understand marketing) and he will never be able to write something more solid because he actually is not a Smalltalk programmer and does not know it well. He is making a really bad service.

If I'm not mistaken, he created the following blog: https://smalltalk.tech.blog/ . It contains "solid" articles from Leandro Caniglia and Lorenzo Schiavina. It also contains an article about his recent programming competition (currently under way): https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/02/08/the-results-are-in/ . This is one heck of a competition, and it's a great promotion for Pharo!

It is not normal to talk about yourself in third person.

Re: Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon

#13

Post by louiscyphre » Thu, Feb 13, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

theamk wrote: post #4

I think of the big problems with Smalltalk is how bad the marketing is. There are few posts which get brought up over and over, and they claim the things that are clearly false ("It can be learned in its entirety within 15 minutes!") or misleading (the one productivity study which is by now decades old.. the claim that it has "simple syntax"). I'd like to encourage Smalltalk advocates to write more "from the trenches…

If you do a sweeping Google search, you will find many Smalltalk posts "from the trenches" over the years. However, they've done little to elevate the language. I disagree that this is the best way to market a programming language.

Even Haskell hasn't done that well using this approach. With all these "from the trenches" posts, Haskell is still only #45 at TIOBE. It's #26 at PYPL and falling! In terms of pull requests at GitHub, Haskell is #28 and falling! See https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2019/2.