Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Howard Stearns, in a comment on Cees' post about Smalltalk and Java:

About manager’s preference for Java: Don’t understimate non-technical factors! There’s no question in my mind that Lisp is strictly more expressive than Smalltalk. And in the project I work on (Croquet), some of the key people are probably more proficient at Lisp than Smalltalk. And yet there are other factors…. For managers in “the enterprise”, the key factors are risk/predictability. Suppose some project can be done in two weeks with 2 really good Lisp/Squeak cowboys, but in in 20 weeks with 10 completely commodity programmers. And suppose that all projects, regardless of duration, always turn out to be +/- 8 weeks of estimate (often due to non-technical factors), and 50% of all project fail no matter what you do (pick your own favorite percentage). Now, if you play poker, which bet gives you the best odds of making your goal within 25% of your estimate?

Well, let's look at the item that many managers look at - cost over the course of a year. Which will cost you more: Those two "cowboys", or the 10 "commodity" developers? Heck, let's say you find yourself 2 really good people, and pay them each $175k per year, as opposed to paying each of the 10 commodity guys $80k?

The only question is whether you buy the productivity numbers. Why not try a pilot project with 1-3 Smalltalkers, and set them a task that you figure would take your commodity staff 6 months to do?

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, java

Looks like Sun might add closures to Java - complete with nasty syntax. When they add that and dynamic language support, they'll have everything required to actually have a reasonable language. Sadly, they'll still have the vast well of complexity...

The Yankee Group thinks that the PS3 will win the next generation console wars and end up on top. This makes me wonder: are they being paid by Sony, or are they all on crack? Seriously - I posted on this stuff just yesterday. Here's their take:

Yankee Group today revealed that despite intense competition from Microsoft and Nintendo, the Sony PlayStation 3 will lead sales in North America - though by a narrow margin. As a result of video game consoles’ emergence as platforms for digital distribution, Microsoft and Sony are engaged in a bruising battle for market dominance. Microsoft is off to a fast start, launching the Xbox 360 nearly 12 months before the PlayStation 3. However, by the time third-generation consoles reach market maturity in 2011, the PlayStation 3 will once again be the market leader.

Here's a key indicator for those guys: $600. That's the base price for a PS3 (and Sony will be taking a bath on each console sold at that price). It would not surprise me if the PS3 drove Sony out of the console business - but it would surprise me a lot if they managed to beat out MS.

Nintendo will be quietly profitable with the Wii, and I expect MS to grab the number one position. I expect Sony to take a severe beating from a cash perspective.

Technorati Tags: games, gadgets, sony, microsoft

Doc Searls calls BS on Carr's argument about blog hierarchies. I posted on this the other day, but I like Doc's response better than mine.

Scoble prefers Outlook:

Heck, I’m nearly being forced to use Google Calendar and I really really really hate it (sorry, I’m an Outlook addict). If Google can’t get me excited about its calendar there’s no way that I’ll use a calendar from a company I’ve never heard of, don’t trust. Sorry. That’s the entrepreneur’s challenge. Google can win me over just by sheer momentum. Translation: my boss will say “you vil use Google and you vil like it.”

My dislike of Outlook's calendar function doesn't have much to do with my general dislike of Outlook. I have tried multiple desktop calendar apps, and I've never warmed to them. I like Google's, because it's simple and it stays out of my way. Admittedly, I'm not in a corporate office, so my needs are somewhat different here.

It looks like the leading airlines can't spot a major marketing opportunity when they see it: they are taking a pass on broadband service on the plane:

It [Boeing] invested heavily in the satellite based system but most carriers have opted for cheaper internet services using cellular networks.

Yeah, I can feel the burn from 9600 baud service. On long haul (tran-atlantic and trans-pacific) flights, this kind of service would have been a major differentiator.

Technorati Tags: travel, airlines

Scoble on game systems:

My brother is right. The games are what sells the console. But there’s more to the Xbox too. Media Center is gonna be important here (you can play your pictures, audio, video that’s kept on a PC somewhere else in the house on your Xbox through its Wifi connections).

Price point matters more than Scoble (or the commenters on his brother's blog) think. The GameCube (and the upcoming Wii) hit the disposable income, impulse buy sweet spot for a lot of people. The 360 is more expensive, but still within the "family present" range. The PS3, at $600+ ? That's "major discussion with the spouse" time. In my house, that price point competes against a new PC, or a new video camera, or a new high end digital camera. I suspect that's going to be the case all over.

Sure, there are people who will pay $600 for a game system. But there are a ton more who will pay $250, IMHO.

Technorati Tags: management, consoles, games

Scoble on YouTube and sticky sites:

John Dvorak is right about YouTube  (damn, I never thought I’d be using the words “Dvorak” and “right” in the same sentence).

You wanna beat YouTube you gotta pass the BlinkTest. Next! Who wants to submit something for the BlinkTest?

One small issue - no matter how sticky the site is, what's the revenue model? They have astounding bandwidth and storage costs, and - so far as I can tell - no way to actually make money. YouTube may pass the "Blink Test", but I suspect that it fails the only business test that actually matters.

I'm not a huge fan of government run services, but the various efforts to set up Municipal WiFi seem to be a reaction to the utter inertia of the telcos. Witness the standard objections of Verizon to a Michigan effort, and then read about QWest's decision that the pacific northwest doesn't need fiber:

Over a year has passed since the study, with no meaningful change in the Seattle broadband scene. Qwest still has no plans to offer anything beyond its current vanilla DSL offerings in the near future, according to Notebaert. With 55 percent of area residents still on dial-up by Qwest's figures, there's no demand says the Qwest CEO. "If the customer says 'I'm ready,' we're going to pour it on," he said. "I can see over the next couple of years—say three to five -- customers will want 10 [Mbps speeds] and then going to 25 [Mbps]."

With clueful comments like that, is it any wonder that municipalities want to build out on their own? Downloadable tv/movies are here already, and that's going to require bandwidth.

We had our fancy dinner of the week last might, at the California Grill. It's at the top of the Contemporary Resort, and you can watch the Magic Kingdom Fireworks from there. It was good, but a bit expensive - it will be awhile before we eat there again. Here's a picture my daughter took from up there, looking out on Cinderella's Castle:

It was a pretty nice evening.

Mike Arrington noticed: an MS developer blog (Stuart Padley) let slip some details about upcoming features in Windows Live. Apparently someone in corporate didn't like that, and had him pull the post.

Of course, 9 gazillion cached copies exist, and it's only getting more notice now. You want to bury a post? Simply ignore it. Having it deleted will just draw attention.

Technorati Tags: PR

Patrick Logan notes that the next Portland (Oregon) Smalltalk meeting is coming up in September:

The next meeting's lined up, it will be at 7PM on September 12th (second tuesday of the month) at the McMenamins on NE Broadway (1504 NE Broadway, http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=32 )

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Hmm. Seems Nick Carr has decided that there's no escape for those in the long tail. He quotes Kent Newsome, who writes:

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren't listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either ...

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy writing. But sometimes it feels vaguely depressing to write something, put it up and wait anxiously for someone to reply via comment or link.

The thing is, it's not one blogosphere. There are the political blogs, like Kos and RedState. They have virtually no interaction with blogs like mine (or even with Carr's, or Scoble's - both of whom sometimes touch on politics). My readership skews heavily into Smalltalkers and people interested in dynamic languages in general - I'm unlikely to attract many die hard C++ fanatics (for that matter, I'm not likely to be reading their stuff either).

Which is not to say that nothing of interest is being said in those places. Blogs attract a niche audience, based on the topics covered by the author(s). That's just the way it is. When I started this blog in 2002, I attracted about 12 pageviews a day, and it went like that for months. I've slowly built up an audience, which has been stable in the 10,000 - 20,000 pageview per day range for awhile now. I didn't get there overnight; heck, I didn't get into the thousands of pageviews until sometime in my third year.

If I had been trying this in a magazine, I'm sure that I would have lost the slot in that first year. The nice thing about the net is that you can take as long as you want to try and build an audience. As well, that audience doesn't need to be huge - if you attract a community of interested readers, that's pretty cool all by itself - and it's something that most people wouldn't have the money to try in print form. So go ahead, and write for your own reasons - if it's interesting, readers will follow.

Technorati Tags: PR

François Beausoleil wonders whether the internet is one big hash table, and has some Ruby code that makes the assumption :) Equivalent Smalltalk code would be easy, but I'm on my way to a theme park at the moment...

Two pieces of good news:

Tigers beat the Red Sox

Yankees beat the Orioles

Up by 3, 4 in the loss column!

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees, redsox

Bob Nemec reports on last night's Smalltalk meeting in Toronto.

Some pics from Disney - here's a picture of the slide at the beach Club, taken from the boat pier (where you can ride over to MGM):

You climb up a stair to that box, and whoosh - down you go. It's a great slide into a fantastic pool. Over to Magic Kingdom: here's a shot from two days ago, when we walked in:

That's main street in the distance, with a horse drawn carriage coming down. Finally, a shot of the "Tree of Life" over at the Animal Kingdom:

That's the back side, between the Africa and Asia areas. It's been a fun week, and a nice escape from the various troubles of the world.

Rogers Cadenhead has the details on Dell's battery recall. As they noted on the Buzz Out Loud podcast I listened to last night, Apple has been quietly recalling batteries as well - and there have been cell phone battery recalls as well. Seems to me that someone is shaving a few too many pennies in the manufacturing process...

Rogers Cadenhead explains why moderation of blog comments is not censorship:

After a decade of publishing on the web, I finally reached my fuck-that moment regarding censorship a few months ago. Someone else can carry the First Amendment flag. The speech here isn't free to me -- it's $225 a month plus labor. Telling someone you have a right to free speech on their site is like walking into their house and demanding a ham sandwich.

That exactly correct. I moderate the blogs here, since they are hosted on Cincom hardware. Rogers is paying for his hosting directly, so - as he says - complaints about censorship are like waltzing into a house and demanding a soapbox.

If the government censors you, it's censorship. If you get moderated off on a private blog, it's not.

Ahh, standards. I downloaded Windows Live Editor, and tried to hook it up to my blog via the MetaWebLog API. Ecto works using that, w.bloggar works using that, BlogJet works using that. Live Editor tells me that it gets an invalid response from the getCategories API. The problem is almost certainly not Microsoft's editor - it's probably another error due to Dave Winer's complete inability to create a spec. I've posted on this topic before; I won't be able to address this until I go home, and can try it against my test server.

And people wonder why Atom is catching on...

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Evan points to a significant update of the Blogger service. I guess Google hasn't just been sitting on their hands. Would have been a good idea to mention that this was in the works though.

Technorati Tags: Google, blogger

James McGovern:

Likewise, many folks feel that Smalltalk is either irrelevant or don't even understand its value proposition. It would be wonderful for James Robertson to share his thinking towards why folks should still care about the language.

I've made that post more than once :) The bottom line seems to be this: most people simply don't believe the productivity claims. Here's an example that shows what you can do when the library designers don't have asinine ideas like "final" declarations. Here's a walk through of how you can debug a Smalltalk web app - somewhat simpler than the asp/jsp model, I think.

The main thing is this: In Smalltalk, the runtime is never closed off - you can keep your application open for ongoing development. I did this with BottomFeeder; I can open a workspace and a browser right in the runtime. I can write scripts against the application easily that way. What if I want information for which there's no easy to access GUI interface? Simple: I just open the workspace and script something, as I demonstrated here.

In more "normal" situations, Smalltalk just makes your life simpler. Have a look at Cees' post: Java (and similarly, the MS languages) just get in your way. You're coding to make the compiler happy rather than to solve an actual problem. Remember what you job is: it's to solve actual problems. Why should you invest the extra hours required to make some compiler developer in California (or Washington) happy?

Now, as I said last night, a lot of people will scoff at Cees' example, saying that he was trying to code in Smalltalk while using Java. To wit:

I am the kind of programmer that thinks that “if” statements should be avoided, and if I repeat an “if” in every method in a class, my refactoring alarm starts to go off. Now, in Smalltalk, this would have a simple solution:

doSomething: key with: ...
  ^self withAuthentication: key do: [...].

withAuthentication: key do: aBlock
  ^(self authenticate: key)
    ifTrue: aBlock
    ifFalse: [Result newWithMessage: 'authentication failed']

A complete no-brainer with mostly similar solutions in Python, Perl and Ruby (to name some other dynamic languages).

I will spare you the code, but my first attempt was to use an anonymous inner class as a work-around for Java’s lack of closures. The result was much worse than the original code, enough to dub Java “LISB” (Lots of Irritating Stupid Braces). I got rid of the “if” statement, but at a price I was not willing to pay.

Note that he mentions that this is a no brainer using other dynamic languages (meaning: the power here is not limited to Smalltalk). It's only in the handcuff languages that you end up doing the extra code dance.

Ruby is gaining adherents because of this - and we are seeing a small, but measurable, increase in the interest in Smalltalk. People looking at Ruby are naturally inclined to have a look at Smalltalk as well. You could give it a whirl yourself - and feel free to send comments my way, either here or by email.

I'll add a small note about comments - part of my spam blocking efforts involve automatically turning comments off after a post leaves the front page. So if you see this post after that happens, you won't be able to add a comment.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Boris tells us that there's a Smalltalk meetup this Friday in Vancouver:

What: Informal Seaside/Squeak/VisualWorks/Smalltalk Meet Up

When: This Friday , August 18, 2006 @ 6:00PM PST

Where: Stamp’s Landing Neighborhood Pub - 610 Stamps Landing, Vancouver, BC

Google Map

Looks like fun. I'll still be Disney-ing then :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Cees reports that Java still sucks :) You could argue that he's trying to fit a Smalltalk metaphor into a language that doesn't work that way... except that's pretty much his point.

Technorati Tags: java

Only in DisneyWorld: on our way out of the Magic Kingdom, my daughter took this snapshot:

Looks like Mickey with a sombrero :)

Michael Lucas-Smith is trying to kick off a grass roots effort to get more C libraries wrapped for use in Cincom Smalltalk - he seems to have attracted some interest. Mind you, Michael is being too modest - he's done a fair bit of that work already.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Based on the APIs the site claims to support, it looks like Windows Live Writer should work with Silt. I'll have to download it and see how it goes.

There's a small new display at MGM - "The Making of Narnia". It's pretty neat in the room where they've got the film clips and an animatronic of the White Queen. There's a forest and the lamp post:

We had some rain today (steady - kind of unusual for Orlando at this time of year). Otherwise, it was a good day.

Steve Rubel notes that Google doesn't like being verbed:

The Independent Online reports that Google has fired off a series of legal letters to the media, asking them not to use the name of the company as a verb. This despite the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's include the search engine as a verb - e.g. "to google."

It's too late for that - it's time to just deal with the reality - they could "google it" :)

Technorati Tags: management

We got up late, and just meandered around World Showcase today. It's a nice part of Epcot - kind of like a permanent world's fair. When we passed the French Pavilion, there was a guy doing a show outside - as an assistant handed him chairs, he stacked them and climbed up. Here's a shot of him:

The guy further down is handing a chair up. Here's the guy all the way at the top - the last chair only had three legs:

Then we saw something I haven't seen before (odd, given how many times I've been to the place) - there's a drawbridge over near the Mexican pavilion, and in the mid afternoon they open it up and send in the fireworks ships. Here's a ship with the launchers they use to send some of them up at night:

It was a nice day too - cooler here than it was when I went to Ohio a couple weeks ago to teach a Smalltalk class. Go figure :)

Rogers Cadenhead has announced the publication of version 2.0.8 of the RSS spec:

The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made.

Will the great and terrible Winer have a meltdown?

Being the RIAA means always - always - having negative PR events. Here's the current worst example: father dies, so the RIAA gives them 60 days to grieve before they send the lawyers in with their absurd accusations of wrongdoing. I think it's time to give them battle axes and pointed helmets - they fit the role of medievel vikings perfectly.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, music

Doc Searls talks about his post from Logan as the new airport security regime was coming into effect. It's certainly reporting - his post sounded like a first person "man in the street" interview. We'll be seeing a lot more of that over time.

Technorati Tags: reporting, media

Jonathan Schwartz is providing one huge service to the business community at large: he's demonstrating on his blog how transparency actually works (as opposed to how the Sarb/Ox bozos think it works):

If you want evidence that navigating today's business environment requires careful thinking, consider one particularly ironic issue: posting material information about Sun on my blog, including information about our business results, runs the risk of violating something called Regulation Full Disclosure, or Reg FD. The regulation's goal is to ensure broad, non-exclusionary distribution of material information to the investing public. And somehow, my blog isn't deemed to be such a non-exclusionary distribution vehicle (but a press release, or the Wall Street Journal is). Reg FD is something we're going to be discussing with Commissioner Cox at the SEC (whose views seem to parallel ours - the more transparency the better).

I may not agree with certain aspects of Sun's business plan, but I like the way they are trying to do business. It's a whole lot more useful than the pile of manure called Sarbanes/Oxley.

Live from DisneyWorld, my weekly logs post - something I figured I could do while my wife settled in with unpacking. First up: BottomFeeder downloads, which proceeded at a rate of 193 per day - up from last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	564
Update	203
Linux x86	124
Mac X	98
CE ARM	80
Mac 8/9	64
Solaris	45
HPUX	43
Windows98/ME	43
CE x86	30
Sources	26
Linux Sparc	11
AIX	9
Linux PPC	8
SGI	2

Those numbers look pretty good to me. On to the HTML pages:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45.8%
Internet Explorer	38.6%
Planet Smalltalk	5.8%
Opera	2.8%
Other	3.7%
MSN Bot	2%
Megite	1.3%

Those IE numbers are getting very close to the Mozilla ones. Looks to me like IE7 is making headway. Finally, the RSS numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	21.9%
Mozilla	17.8%
Other	14.2%
Net News Wire	7%
BlogLines	6.7%
Safari RSS	5.9%
Internet Explorer	5.2%
Google Feed Fetcher	4%
NewsGator	3.8%
SharpReader	1.9%
Planet Smalltalk	1.7%
BlogSearch	1.6%
RSS Bandit	1.3%
Liferea	1%
Opera	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
JetBrains	1%
Java	1%
Lilina	1%
Jakarta	1%

Still a lot of variety there. I'm off to the theme parks tomorrow.

We stopped at Wal-Mart after arriving here in Orlando - the new rules at the airport made it simpler to just buy a few things (like toothpaste) here. We also chewed up some time at the Alamo counter - they wanted to charge me $8 a day to add my wife as a driver. We both have the same insurance carrier, so that seemed kind of stupid to me - I haggled with them (to no avail) - and finally just took the car. That left us nowhere onsite to eat dinner, so off to Denny's it was. One healthy (yeah, right :) ) meal later, and we are back in the room.

At least we got here :)

The lack of travel woes continues. Our flight from BWI departed on time. At least at BWI, the lines for checking bags were normal, and the security lines were short and quick - of course, I was leaving mid-day, so I missed the normal crush in the early AM and early PM.

There were signs everywhere mentioning the "no liquids" rules, but there weren't any checks that I saw either - other than the X-Rays at security, no one looked in any of my bags or asked me any question. The only annoyance was the return of "take your shoes off" time.

Technorati Tags: security, airport

After all the news reporting yesterday, I was ready for a nasty bit of waiting in line today - so I arrived here (BWI) about 3 hours early - I normally don't arrive more than an hour ahead of time. I should have done that today. The line to check bags was long, but no longer than normal for summer vacation travel season. The inside security line was just about non-existant, and while there were tons of signs telling me that I couldn't have liquids (what a colossal waste of time that is), there didn't seem to be any extra checks for it.

So anyway, here I am, cooling my heels with almost two hours of dead time in front of me. At least there's WiFi.

It looks like the advertising model for the web has some of the same baked in delusions as the advertising model for TV has: everyone assumes that the numbers mean something so that they can go forward:

Web sites that rely on advertising -- including some the most poplar, such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube -- get paid based on the amount of traffic to their site and the number click-throughs on their ads. Without accurate data, advertisers have no idea how much they should be paying.

The only reason the system isn't breaking down, and advertisers aren't pulling out, is because they have no choice but to play. They are taking informed guesses, based on the shoddy statistics available. And Google et al. are using every strategy they can find to deal with this problem.

The introduction of DVRs started to punch holes in the TV nodel - once it became clear that people were skipping ads, the shared delusion got harder to maintain. It's still there; money has not (yet) dropped in TV-land.

In reality, it's questionable whether people ever paid much attention (even more so once the remote came along). Last night I flipped between "Band of Brothers" on the History Channel and the Yankee game on ESPN, changing channels at ad breaks. The same thing happens on the web. Take Salon, which allows you free access if you "watch" an ad. I use Firefox, which has tabs. I hit the ad, then flip to some other page. I go back after I finish, hitting the "enter Salon" link. The advertiser sure isn't getting much from me, even though the ad was delivered.

I suspect that a lot of web ads are "viewed" this way. Which only makes the accuracy of data problem worse. I count as a viewer of the Salon ads (and sometimes, by mistake, as a click through - although I simply close the window/tab in that case). In the grand scheme of things, I don't really see a strategy that deals with this.

Technorati Tags: advertising, tv