Let me introduce myself. I'm from South Africa and I have about 14 years of smalltalk experience. I program in many languages but have not found anything as simple, powerful and elegant. I am not going to name any names as my focus is purely on smalltalk. There are several large blue chip companies that have smalltalk systems running their core business. They will not admit it but it made them successful over the years.
My previous company was using Gemtalk(stone)/S with a visualworks frontend/Angular web frontend, we retrofitted a SUnit tests into a running gemtalk(gemstone) system and wrote over 10K tests in 10 years to give all programmers a sense of safety. We automated deploys, tests, releases, audits etc. We were able to roll out new features like faster than any modern language system. We were able to out-develop every system that was going to replace it. The system has been active for over 20 years and the company grew into a large corporate.
I currently work for another large corporate in a very small team (4 programmers), their system dates back even further: over 30 years. It started in Digitalk smalltalk that was ported to Visualworks, it is essentially a domain driven design with lots of reusable plumbing on that runs on top of a large SQL database. It has a fat client front-end to expose information summarised to make business sense(And enough SUnit tests to cover the basics). They also grew into a large player over the years. Recently they have been buying systems at eye watering prices that cost multiple times more and offer way less, and are actively talking about replacing the system with a more "modern" language that can fill the gaps they have. 75% of our team is close to retirement age.
I have yet to see another language where you can debug, inspect, deploy and fix code all from one action. Does something like this exist in another language? If you combine this with Unit/Scenario tests you can iterate very quickly. Most other languages have a server to compile&deploy to and it takes quite a long time before code can be ready to run on the server. In smalltalk you simply inspect a value, change a line/s, restart execution at the beginning of the method and step to cursor, click click and you're done. Working... run tests and publish code. Done.
Management's argument is that they can not find smalltalk programmers. They want to be able to advertise a post and get a heap of CVs that understand the language and hit the ground running.
Pretty much the same argument when buying an EV, you need charge points before people will buy an EV. You need lots of EVs on the road to make charge points a viable business. It seems like these businesses have the latest Smallktalk technology (The EV) but they are running out of Programmers (charge points). If all the charge points (retired or broken down) then who still wants an EV?
Do we still have lots of small-talkers actively working on smalltalk systems? Is this only a perception that there are no programmers in the space? Have we retired all the charge points?
If you are working in another language would you consider working smalltalk? Or would this limit career growth?
Have you moved to other languages because you could not find smalltalk posts?
If you made it this far, congrats. I would like to add one personal gripe: I think smalltalk is stuggling because we never implemented the editor in vim with keyboard only interaction. Vimtalk
