Morons on parade
Friend of mine is looking for a job, and related this exchange:
[Person1] A fund nearby got in contact with me yesterday. They're looking for someone to write a portfolio/risk management system and heard about the one I wrote. They were very excited.
[Person2] person1: In Smalltalk?
[Person1] Until I told him I did it in Smalltalk. "Don't you think it's odd to write a system in a language like that?"
[Person1] That was his response
I love group-think. Offer to solve a problem, and anything that veers from the expected path raises flags. Sure, there are times that's a valid concern. But if you find a person to help you build a business - and you found them because of their previous expertise in the field in question - wouldn't actually listening to them make some sense?
Comments
Maintenance
[Randy Charles Morin] June 23, 2006 14:55:16.000
The problem often with languages like Smalltalk is maintenance. Finding another adequate Smalltalk developer would be very difficult. Image if you quit or get hit by a bus, he would be screwed. Lately, I was consulted about a Delphi project and recommended they upgrade the project to C# because they were having a difficult time finding good programmers who wanted to work exclusively in Delphi. In many case, any language will do the job during the development phase, but the lack of a core development community behind that languages, makes it an unwise choice.
[] June 23, 2006 15:20:06.000
That really depends on the language. I'd say you'd find it much easier to find a good developer who'd want to work in Smalltalk than a good developer who'd want to work in Delphi. Visual Basic is a very widely used language, but I've found it unbelievably difficult to recruit a single decent VB programmer. C# is a little better, but not much.
On the other hand, I don't find it a problem that large companies pick unproductive languages. That behaviour allows small companies to gain an edge on larger companies. If large companies picked technologies based on their effectiveness, rather than for reasons of politics or ignorance, small companies would find it much harder to compete.
Re: Morons on parade
[ James Robertson] June 23, 2006 16:31:46.000
Comment by James Robertson
Sheesh, Finding a Smalltalker is not hard. Sure, there are more Java guys out there. There are plenty of Smalltalkers though
person1: person2: person1
[Jimmy James] June 23, 2006 16:39:11.000
Is the person1 person2 stuff supposed to be in chronological order / make any sense?
[Person2] person1: In Smalltalk?
WTF? Did person1 or person2 say this? Did person2 say "person1..."? So person2 (or person1, not sure) said "in smalltalk?" and then Person1 said "until I told him I did it in SmallTalk 'quote' Don't you think it's odd..."
Were you drinking when you typed this up or am I missing something?
Re: Morons on parade
[ James Robertson] June 23, 2006 18:48:03.000
Comment by James Robertson
[Person2] person1: blah blah...
means that Person2 was getting Person1's attention.
I call BS
[ anonymous] June 24, 2006 5:29:46.000
Comment by anonymous
Finding an decent Smalltalker would be no more bother than looking on com.lang.smalltalk.*
I would also say that the odds of finding a *good* Smalltalker would be much easier than finding a *good* Java programmer. Number of Smalltalk interviews: 2 (only because the janitor lied on his resume!) Java programmers: 150.
Now, if some tremendous surge in demand for Smalltalkers happened, people may run into problems.
Re. Maintenance
[Steve W] June 25, 2006 0:46:33.368
Randy, I had a similar discussion with the project manager of our Smalltalk/GemStone app at work. He is quite keen to expand the use of that application to other products and I asked him if he wasn't concerned that the technology was getting outdated. His response? "You mean like COBOL? Smalltalk is an established language. We will always be able to find Smalltalk developers."