Anything by Richard Kenneth Eng isn't worth the read. Props to the guy for promoting what he loves, but he never gives any good reasons or data to back up the non-existent reasons.<p>His personal points of view are all you get, heavily disguised as assertions about Smalltalk and the environment being categorically better or easier than things with which nobody seems to be exhibiting any real problems. Because the assertions aren't backed up with evidence, it's hard to take seriously. Not to mention every single post on every single website just repeats the same things ad infinitum; it's basically spam at this point.<p>This is mirrored by some of the more rabid fans. Whenever Smalltalk is brought up on HN, there's invariably someone or other to come and espouse that live coding is better than compile-debug-rinse-repeat. Why? Because it is. In what way is it better? It just is.<p>I mean, why wouldn't I want to switch to developing apps in an unfamiliar way with little in the way of easy-to-understand documentation, contained within an alien user interface to my beloved macOS, limited to an unnecessarily difficult-to-use IDE, using a language that I can only use in the IDE, that can't integrate with damn near any other popular or modern tools and workflows, whose ability to target mobile (or hell, native platform-specific experiences) is either in its infancy (in 2018!) or completely non-existent, and whose proponents can't give a clear answer to what the big deal is?<p>Yeah, no. A million posts saying the same things won't make a damned bit of difference.
Maybe it's my age but I am getting increasingly tired of the same articles about Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo being on the edge of a breakthrough. Surely Smalltalk is nice and also has its place in the history of programming languages. Today, however, there's such a vast number of interesting programming languages that are used "in production" that I doubt Smalltalk will suddenly get more traction.<p>What makes articles like this one really annoying are the same old claims that seem to be a bit delusional if not outright wrong, such as:<p>"the Pharo IDE is much simpler and cleaner than Visual Studio and Eclipse. Even children can use it without difficulty!"<p>The accompanying screenshot surely doesn't support that claim.
Kenneth Eng writes only about smalltalk... Despite promising directions like Amber ST, somehow smalltalk has failed to reach critical mass, and that's a shame. My feeling is that something about their approach promotes learning by showing rather than reading and that has limited the uptake. Most successful proponents move on... Avi Bryant and Ramon Leon and perhaps Mark Watson. I've had email exchanges with almost all these folks and overall the feeling is that it was a great environment whose time has passed. I think the Forth guy Don Hopkins is also a fan as is perhaps Joe Armstrong of Erlang fame. And of course HN loves Alan Kay.
The article is a bit light on what's special about it.<p>I'm still a fan of the bold moves eve¹ did.<p>¹ <a href="http://witheve.com/" rel="nofollow">http://witheve.com/</a>
If your language is tightly coupled to a specific IDE, that's cool and I might play around with it, but good luck getting me to use it in production.
I remember in the 90s Smalltalk was going to be the next big thing, IBM were all set to throw their weight behind it with VisualAge as the next big enterprise development tool... Then Java happened and IBM ditched Smalltalk and leaped on that bandwagon instead and the rest is history<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_VisualAge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_VisualAge</a>