Thanks for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the post.

Thanks for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the post.

I just wanted to add that here in Argentina there are at least eight companies working only with Smalltalk.

We also have a conference that took place last year and this year is going to be back, here is the link: http://neuquina.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar:8001/Sma…

Thanks a lot of writing this post was really cool to read and to know that there is a common sense of object oriented programming.

Regards.

I tried my hand with the .Net Bridge, and it works well if you're just using the .Net framework class library (and of course any Smalltalk classes). Where it gets hairy is if you try to bring in an outside .Net library or do COM work through .Net. Then you have to use .Net's own late-binding mechanisms which are a pain. In Smalltalk you get late binding for free. With .Net you have to do gymnastics. It supports it, but it's no picnic. One of the projects I've had in the back of my head for a while is maybe I'll try my hand at improving the bridge for these scenarios. The experience should be better.

Another option I heard about a couple years ago was WxWindows for Squeak. I've heard complaints about it, because it makes you do some gymnastics, but I think it works.

I am familiar with the ESUG list of companies. Things like this give me hope.

I consider myself lucky that I was exposed to Smalltalk in college. It was part of a senior course on programming languages, exploring how they worked; different types of systems (compiled, interpreted), different types of languages (imperative, functional, object-oriented). It was a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I think we covered Smalltalk for 2 weeks. I also got exposed to Lisp, in a different class, covering it for the same length of time. So I got a “taste” of them. Honestly, I think there are more jobs for Lisp programmers now than there were back then. ITA Software uses it, as does Orbitz. Both are in the U.S., I think.

As for what Paul Graham said, I'd like to believe that. The thing is, I think so many of the best developers don't believe they can find work using an esoteric language, so they learn Java or something, and apply their talents towards that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. A significant minority of talented developers are using and pushing for Ruby and Python to gain wider acceptance. That's good, IMO. They're a step in the right direction.

I have a suspicion what Graham said is boosterism. He's very much into believing that everyone should do what he's done with his life. I tend to agree with what he says, but I think if he were right then we'd see more development in esoteric languages than we do today.

I read up on what Graham wrote about his ViaWeb company. He began it using Lisp. He sold it to Yahoo. It's now called Yahoo Store. Yahoo eventually ported most of it to C++ and Perl. The reason they gave is they couldn't find enough Lisp developers to maintain it. Graham disagreed with that decision, of course, but that was Yahoo's determination.

I think Yahoo didn't have enough faith in Graham's decision to use Lisp. They probably said to themselves, “Yeah, whatever. He's a bit eccentric.” If they understood his reasons, they would've pushed more for Lisp competence, pressuring CS programs to teach it more because, “We need Lisp developers.” That's my perception of how these sorts of decisions happen at universities. They try to deny that they respond to industry pressure, but they do.

The thing is universities (in the U.S.) tend to teach them with a very clear message that “These are research languages. You won't be using them for your work.” One of the things that's bugged me for a while is how Lisp was pigeon-holed as an AI language right from the start, as if it wasn't good for anything else. This doesn't do it justice.

Yes, startups have more freedom. So long as the founders can take care of most of the development themselves they can get away with that. I don't think corporate perception that there are too few developers who understand the esoteric languages is wrong. I think it would be a challenge to hire a whole lot of Lisp or Smalltalk developers. In my view it's a chicken and egg problem. You have on the one hand perception that there aren't enough developers who understand this stuff (so startups typically use PHP), and on the other you have a perception on the part of developers that they can't find work using them, so they go to PHP or Java.

I think there is a perception as well that in order to be able to handle a project you MUST be able to hire X number of developers at a rate range Y. In addition, a lot of commercial concerns look at industry support. There's a perception that you need good 3rd party support for whatever development platform you use, and if it doesn't have it it's not worth using. What Graham says, and I believe it's true, is if you use an esoteric language you don't need as many developers. In fact large teams are inefficient anyway. Secondly, you don't necessarily need the third party support if you have a good technical team that can roll its own solutions. So it takes someone brave, willing to buck convention, to do this. They also have to believe that their technology is a competitive advantage. Unfortunately in the U.S. for the past several years there's been a growing belief that “I.T. doesn't matter” (ie. technology is not a differentiator), and that IT management is what can differentiate one company from the next. There's some truth to that, but it's not the whole story.

Lisp has the same problem. I found a list of Lisp companies, with only one from Belgium: PEPITe, a spin-off company of the University of Liège.

So I didn't say that Smalltalk is not suitable for real-world software development, but it is just not used much in industry. As far as I know, most of the traditional programming jobs require either Java, .NET or C++. Furthermore, most programmers have no experience with Smalltalk. To the best of my knowledge, the only university in Belgium that actively teaches Smalltalk is the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who perform research in programming languages. They host the Planet Smalltalk blog, hosted ESUG meetings and have employed some well-known people in the Smalltalk community (e.g. Roel Wuyts).

I can imagine that managers are afraid that they won't find programmers to maintain their codebase if they use Smalltalk. Although Paul Graham once said: “if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it”, I have a slight feeling that most companies don't think that way

Of course, it all depends on the career you choose (and what you like to do). I can imagine that startup companies have more freedom to pick their preferred development tools.

From reading Jeffrey Massung's blog, Dolphin Smalltalk indeed seemed to offer easy integration of Windows libraries (e.g. DirectX). I am not sure how Squeak compares to this. They have an FFI interface and a .NET bridge as far as I know. An advantage of Squeak to me is that it runs on many platforms, including mobile devices.